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
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
Meta logo
Meta
Medium
Software Engineer Locked

Design content moderation for a posting app

This question evaluates a candidate's ability to design content-moderation features, covering competencies in scalable system design, API and data mod...

System Design
4
0
65 people solved
Feb 12, 2026
Mithril logo
Mithril
Medium
Software Engineer

Design a hybrid-cloud GPU allocation service

System Design: Hybrid-Cloud GPU Resource Allocation & Job Management Design a service that allocates and manages GPU resources for ML training jobs in...

System Design
8
0
64 people solved
Feb 12, 2026
OpenAI logo
OpenAI
Hard
Software EngineerSenior+ Locked

Design a Slack-like real-time messaging system

This question evaluates a candidate's competency in designing scalable, fault-tolerant real-time messaging systems, including message persistence and ...

System Design
57
0
407 people solved
Feb 12, 2026
Rippling logo
Rippling
Medium
Software Engineer Locked

Design a news aggregator like Google News

This question evaluates a candidate's competency in designing scalable, low-latency distributed systems for content aggregation, personalization, and ...

System Design
21
0
245 people solved
Feb 12, 2026
Meta logo
Meta
Medium
Software EngineerSenior+

Design Real-Time Auctions for Social Posts

Design a real-time auction feature for a large social photo and video app. A creator can attach an auction to a post. Viewers can place bids, and ever...

System Design
2
0
27 people solved
Feb 11, 2026
Meta logo
Meta
Medium
Software EngineerSenior+ Locked

Design a Top-K trending items service

This question evaluates competency in large-scale system design, real-time streaming ingestion, distributed aggregation, and trade-offs between exact ...

System Design
8
0
97 people solved
Feb 11, 2026
Microsoft logo
Microsoft
Hard
Software Engineer Locked

Design a simple API rate limiter

This question evaluates competency in designing scalable, low-latency API rate limiting, covering distributed-systems reasoning, storage and caching t...

System Design
8
0
92 people solved
Feb 11, 2026
Atlassian logo
Atlassian
Medium
Software Engineer Locked

Design a simple greeting-card web app

This question evaluates a candidate's ability to design a minimal web application architecture for an MVP greeting-card service, covering frontend/bac...

System Design
4
0
55 people solved
Feb 11, 2026
Atlassian logo
Atlassian
Easy
Software Engineer Locked

Design a Data Stream Processor

This question evaluates the ability to design real-time data stream processing systems, testing competencies such as high-throughput ingestion, event ...

System Design
4
0
58 people solved
Feb 9, 2026
OpenAI logo
OpenAI
Hard
Software Engineer Locked

Design reliable high-volume chatbot system

This question evaluates a candidate's ability to design scalable, highly available, and fault-tolerant backend architectures for stateful chatbot serv...

System Design
28
0
204 people solved
Dec 6, 2025
Meta logo
Meta
Medium
Software Engineer Locked

Design an online coding contest platform

This question evaluates a candidate's ability to design scalable, reliable, and secure distributed systems for real-time, event-driven workloads, cove...

System Design
4
0
65 people solved
Feb 7, 2026
Cloverhealth logo
Cloverhealth
Medium
Software Engineer Locked

Design appointment scheduling data model and APIs

This question evaluates backend data modeling, REST API design, and enforcement of domain constraints within a web framework, focusing on scheduling, ...

System Design
1
0
28 people solved
Feb 5, 2026
Airbnb logo
Airbnb
Hard
Software Engineer

Design multi-currency pricing end-to-end

System Design: Multi-Currency Price Display and Booking Context You are building a global travel marketplace where guests discover listings, view pric...

System Design
22
0
177 people solved
Aug 12, 2025
Rippling logo
Rippling
Medium
Software Engineer Locked

Design personalized news aggregation service

The question evaluates the ability to design a large-scale personalized content delivery system, testing competencies in distributed systems architect...

System Design
8
0
75 people solved
Oct 4, 2025
Netflix logo
Netflix
Medium
Software Engineer Locked

Design an ad frequency capping system

This question evaluates expertise in designing low-latency, high-throughput distributed systems for stateful online decisioning, encompassing competen...

System Design
35
0
283 people solved
Feb 4, 2026
Google logo
Google
Hard
Software Engineer

Scale median under memory constraints

Scale median under memory constraints Design a Scalable Streaming Median Service Under Memory Constraints Context You are building a service that cons...

System Design
8
0
72 people solved
Aug 8, 2025
Verkada logo
Verkada
Hard
Software Engineer

Design camera access-control service

Design camera access-control service Design an Access-Control Service (Users, Cameras, Nested Groups) Context You are building a multi-tenant access-c...

System Design
19
0
155 people solved
Aug 8, 2025
Netflix logo
Netflix
Medium
Software EngineerSenior+ Locked

Design an ads data model

This question evaluates a candidate's ability to design scalable data models and system architecture for an ads platform, including entity relationshi...

System Design
39
0
274 people solved
Sep 30, 2025

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