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
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
Apple logo
Apple
Medium
Software EngineerSenior+

Design Disk-Based Inventory Serving

Design software for a machine that has no SSD storage and only a small amount of RAM. The machine must service inventory requests using spinning disks...

System Design
7
0
51 people solved
Oct 28, 2025
Apple logo
Apple
Medium
Software EngineerSenior+

Scale Digit-Square Convergence Requests

Design a service that receives very high request volume for the digit-square convergence operation. For each request, the input is a positive integer ...

System Design
3
0
35 people solved
Oct 28, 2025
Anthropic logo
Anthropic
Hard
Software Engineer

Guide and override compiler optimizations

Guiding a Compiler for a VLIW-like Backend You are optimizing hot loops for a VLIW-like target (e.g., DSP/AI accelerator) where the compiler sometimes...

System Design
10
0
172 people solved
Sep 6, 2025
Google logo
Google
Hard
Software Engineer

Design viewing history and resume service

Design: Watched-Video and Resume Playback Service Context Design a backend service that records each user’s watched video list and lets them resume an...

System Design
12
0
91 people solved
Sep 6, 2025
Google logo
Google
Hard
Software Engineer

Design distributed transactions protocol

System Design: Distributed Transactions Across Multiple Services Context You must design a distributed transactions protocol to coordinate updates acr...

System Design
10
0
72 people solved
Sep 6, 2025
LinkedIn logo
LinkedIn
Hard
Software Engineer

Design a scalable calendar system

System Design: Multi-Tenant Calendar at Massive Scale You are designing a multi-tenant calendar platform used by hundreds of millions of users across ...

System Design
13
0
106 people solved
Sep 6, 2025
Amazon logo
Amazon
Hard
Software Engineer

Design locker allocation service

Design a Best-Fit Locker Assignment Component Context You are designing the locker-assignment component for a Locker OS used at physical locker banks ...

System Design
4
0
60 people solved
Sep 6, 2025
Nextdoor logo
Nextdoor
Hard
Software Engineer

Describe CAP, distributed systems, multithreading experience

CAP Theorem, Distributed Systems Design Decisions, and Multithreading Context Provide a structured answer that both explains the concepts and shows ho...

System Design
11
0
100 people solved
Sep 6, 2025
NVIDIA logo
NVIDIA
Hard
Software Engineer

Design an artifact store on K8s and Cassandra

System Design: Exactly-Once Creation by Name on Cassandra, Deletes, and Read API Design Context You run a Java web API on Kubernetes backed by a Cassa...

System Design
5
0
66 people solved
Sep 6, 2025
Google logo
Google
Hard
Software Engineer

Design an elevator control system

Elevator Control System Design (N floors, M elevators) Context You are designing a multi-elevator control system for a building with N floors (1..N) a...

System Design
17
0
126 people solved
Sep 6, 2025
Amazon logo
Amazon
Hard
Software Engineer

Design a keyboard and mouse input system

Question Design an input processing system that captures keyboard and mouse events and can reliably reconstruct what the user typed (answering "what d...

System Design
8
0
78 people solved
Sep 6, 2025
Adobe logo
Adobe
Hard
Software Engineer

Design distributed word count without MapReduce

System Design: Distributed Word Frequency Counting (No MapReduce) Context You need to design a distributed system that computes word frequencies over ...

System Design
7
0
115 people solved
Sep 6, 2025
Adobe logo
Adobe
Hard
Software Engineer

Analyze end-to-end request latency

Question Provide a detailed approach to analyze and improve the end-to-end latency of a web request. The request flows from a browser through a CDN, l...

System Design
13
0
97 people solved
Sep 6, 2025
Cerebras logo
Cerebras
Hard
Software Engineer

Design a Multi-Channel Message Queue

Design a Message Queue with Multi-Channel Messages and Channel-Based Subscriptions Context You are asked to design a message-queue data structure wher...

System Design
11
0
98 people solved
Sep 6, 2025
Snapchat logo
Snapchat
Hard
Software Engineer

Design a streaming ads system

System Design: Ad-Insertion Platform for Live and On-Demand Video Context You are designing an end-to-end ad-insertion platform for a consumer video s...

System Design
4
0
88 people solved
Sep 6, 2025
Klaviyo logo
Klaviyo
Hard
Software Engineer

Design banking with scheduled transfers and merges

Design banking with scheduled transfers and merges In-Memory Banking System with Scheduled Payments and Account Merges Design and implement a single-t...

System Design
16
0
114 people solved
Jul 15, 2025
Rippling logo
Rippling
Medium
Software Engineer

Design a large-scale news app with caching

Scenario Design a simplified news app (mobile + web) for a very large user base. Users can: - open the app and see a personalized news feed - open an ...

System Design
8
0
134 people solved
Oct 17, 2025
Salesforce logo
Salesforce
Medium
Software Engineer Locked

Design a configurable monthly API rate limiter

This question evaluates system-design and distributed-systems skills, focusing on scalable API rate limiting, per-user monthly quota configuration and...

System Design
53
0
444 people solved
Feb 12, 2026

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