Software Engineer System Design Interview Questions

Practice 1,093 real System Design interview questions for Software Engineer roles. From companies including Meta, OpenAI, Amazon, Anthropic, Google.

1.1k Questions 223 Companies08.16.2026
Showing 20 results
Role
Expedia logo
Expedia
Hard
Software Engineer Locked

Design an employee directory with reporting queries

This question evaluates system design competence with emphasis on hierarchical data modeling, concurrent data consistency, API and schema design, and ...

System Design
4
0
89 people solved
Jan 6, 2026
Meta logo
Meta
Medium
Software Engineer Locked

Design a ranking and recommendation system

This question evaluates a candidate's competency in designing end-to-end ranking and recommendation systems, covering candidate generation, ranking, f...

System Design
10
0
65 people solved
Jan 6, 2026
Microsoft logo
Microsoft
Medium
Software Engineer Locked

Design an online ticket booking system

This question evaluates a candidate's proficiency in system design and distributed systems concepts, including scalability, availability, concurrency ...

System Design
5
0
66 people solved
Jan 3, 2026
Anthropic logo
Anthropic
Hard
Software Engineer

Identify and mitigate deduplication program risks

System Design: Robust File Deduplication in the Real World Context You are designing a file deduplication tool that scans large directory trees on one...

System Design
27
0
194 people solved
Aug 14, 2025
Uber logo
Uber
Medium
Software Engineer Locked

Design a meeting scheduler and shopping cart

This question evaluates system design skills across distributed systems, API design, data modeling, indexing, caching, concurrency control, consistenc...

System Design
38
0
548 people solved
Mar 1, 2026
Ixl logo
Ixl
Medium
Software Engineer

Design game credit system with add/spend/refund APIs

System Design Prompt: Game Credit System with Add, Spend, and Refund APIs You are designing a backend service to manage virtual game credits for one o...

System Design
10
0
79 people solved
Jul 2, 2025
Snapchat logo
Snapchat
Hard
Software Engineer Locked

Design a Story feature with offline support

This question evaluates proficiency in large-scale system design, including distributed storage, cache and CDN strategies, API and data model design, ...

System Design
11
0
78 people solved
Jan 2, 2026
xAI logo
xAI
Medium
Software Engineer

Explain ACID and transactions

ACID Transactions: Definitions, Enforcement, Isolation Levels, and Example Context You are designing a service backed by a relational database that su...

System Design
12
0
166 people solved
Aug 12, 2025
Nooks logo
Nooks
Medium
Software Engineer

How would you throttle a crawler?

The crawler above is now a production service. Expanding each page requires an outbound HTTP or API call to fetch its links, and upstream services may...

System Design
4
0
70 people solved
Feb 28, 2026
Bytedance logo
Bytedance
Medium
Software Engineer

Design a TinyURL-like short link service

Design a TinyURL-like service that generates short URLs and redirects users to the original long URLs. Requirements: - Provide APIs to create a short ...

System Design
9
0
66 people solved
Feb 28, 2026
Uber logo
Uber
Medium
Software Engineer Locked

Design an Uber Eats Cart Service

This question evaluates a candidate's ability to design a distributed shopping-cart service for a food-delivery platform, testing competencies in syst...

System Design
68
0
463 people solved
May 7, 2026
Coinbase logo
Coinbase
Hard
Software Engineer

Design image upload end-to-end

Design image upload end-to-end System Design: End-to-End Image Upload Pipeline Context Design an end-to-end system that handles user picture uploads f...

System Design
6
0
74 people solved
Aug 7, 2025
Navan logo
Navan
Medium
Software Engineer

Model booking auxiliary comments with admin updates

Design an object-oriented model (and high-level system design) for a booking system feature that stores auxiliary comments on a reservation. Core requ...

System Design
7
0
95 people solved
Nov 7, 2025
Meta logo
Meta
Medium
Software Engineer

Design a post privacy/visibility system

Design a privacy system for social media posts (similar to Facebook post privacy). Requirements: - Each post can be: Public, Friends, Friends-of-frien...

System Design
5
0
50 people solved
Feb 25, 2026
Meta logo
Meta
Medium
Software Engineer

Design an online auction system

Design an online auction system (eBay-style). Requirements: - Users create auctions with start/end time and starting price. - Users place bids; system...

System Design
8
0
63 people solved
Feb 25, 2026
Meta logo
Meta
Medium
Software Engineer

Design real-time live comments

Design a real-time comment system for live video (e.g., Facebook Live comments). Requirements: - Viewers post comments; all viewers see new comments q...

System Design
5
0
41 people solved
Feb 25, 2026
Meta logo
Meta
Medium
Software Engineer

Design a large-scale web crawler

Design a web crawler that continuously discovers and downloads web pages. Requirements: - Start from seed URLs and crawl at scale. - Avoid duplicate c...

System Design
3
0
46 people solved
Feb 25, 2026
Meta logo
Meta
Medium
Software Engineer

Design an ad click aggregation service

Design a backend service that ingests ad impression and click events and provides aggregated metrics. Requirements: - Ingest a high-volume stream of e...

System Design
3
0
44 people solved
Feb 25, 2026
Booking.com logo
Booking.com
Medium
Software Engineer

Compare heap, stack, Protobuf, gRPC, SQL, CI/CD

Compare heap, stack, Protobuf, gRPC, SQL, CI/CD Technical/Phone Screen: Core Systems and Data Concepts You are interviewing for a Software Engineering...

System Design
28
0
159 people solved
Jul 29, 2025
Meta logo
Meta
Hard
Software Engineer

Design a bank system with scheduling and rankings

Design a bank system with scheduling and rankings Design an In‑Memory Bank System (Technical Screen) You are designing an in‑memory bank ledger that s...

System Design
6
0
101 people solved
Jul 27, 2025

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