Software Engineer System Design Interview Questions

Practice 1,082 real System Design interview questions for Software Engineer roles. From companies including Meta, OpenAI, Amazon, Anthropic, Google.

1.1k Questions 222 Companies08.11.2026
Showing 20 results
Role
OpenAI logo
OpenAI
Hard
Software Engineer

Design an SSH-Based Cloud Development Environment

Design an SSH-Based Cloud Development Environment Design a cloud development environment that is accessed by SSH rather than through a browser. Users ...

System Design
2
0
18 people solved
Jun 25, 2026
Whatnot logo
Whatnot
Medium
Software Engineer Locked

Design a Direct Messaging System for an E-commerce Marketplace

This question evaluates a candidate's ability to design a real-time messaging system, covering distributed systems concepts like durability, ordering ...

System Design
9
0
96 people solved
Jun 11, 2026
Anthropic logo
Anthropic
Hard
Software EngineerSenior+

Review and Improve a Flawed Design Document

Review and Improve a Flawed Design Document You are given a design document for a system that has important omissions or unsafe assumptions. Review it...

System Design
4
0
80 people solved
Apr 16, 2026
Headway logo
Headway
Medium
Software EngineerSenior+ Locked

Design a Rental Search and Booking Platform from Startup to Scale

Design a short-term rental search and booking platform that can evolve from a startup architecture to large-scale traffic. Balance fast, possibly stal...

System Design
6
0
44 people solved
Jun 15, 2026
Snowflake logo
Snowflake
Hard
Software Engineer

Design a Reliable Job Scheduler

Design a Reliable Job Scheduler Design a service that accepts jobs to run at specified times and dispatches them to workers. The system should continu...

System Design
1
0
24 people solved
Jun 9, 2026
Anthropic logo
Anthropic
Medium
Software Engineer Locked

Design Instagram (Feed, Photos, and Friend Recommendations)

This question evaluates a candidate's ability to design a large-scale, read-heavy social media backend, covering data modeling for follow graphs, medi...

System Design
12
0
123 people solved
Jun 23, 2026
Citadel logo
Citadel
Medium
Software Engineer

Design Inventory Availability and Order Placement

Design Inventory Availability and Order Placement Design the inventory portion of an e-commerce system with two core operations: 1. Query the currentl...

System Design
18
0
145 people solved
Apr 6, 2026
Fuse Energy logo
Fuse Energy
Medium
Software Engineer

Design a Fitness Activity Tracking App with Followers and Leaderboards

Design a fitness activity tracking app where followers can see current trails, users can query top activities by time range, and leaderboards are supp...

System Design
15
0
133 people solved
Apr 9, 2026
Apple logo
Apple
Medium
Software Engineer

Object-Oriented Design: Hotel Room Booking System

Object-Oriented Design: Hotel Room Booking System Design the object model and core service for a hotel room booking system. The service must let a cli...

System Design
9
0
124 people solved
Jun 30, 2026
DoorDash logo
DoorDash
Medium
Software EngineerSenior+ Locked

Design a Food Rating System

This question evaluates skills in system design, data modeling, consistency and transactional guarantees, idempotency, scaling, and designing read-hea...

System Design
65
0
825 people solved
Jun 5, 2026
Microsoft logo
Microsoft
Medium
Software Engineer Locked

Design a URL Shortener (High-Level and Low-Level Design)

This question evaluates the ability to design a large-scale distributed system, covering both high-level architecture and low-level implementation det...

System Design
5
0
74 people solved
Jun 12, 2026
Brex logo
Brex
Medium
Software Engineer

Design a Peer-to-Peer Money Transfer System

Design a peer-to-peer money-transfer product. Users can hold an account, send money to another user, view transfer history, and see an accurate balanc...

System Design
3
0
52 people solved
May 8, 2026
Amazon logo
Amazon
Medium
Software Engineer Locked

Object-Oriented Design: Snake Game

This question evaluates a candidate's ability to translate a familiar game into a clean object-oriented model, covering class decomposition, encapsula...

System Design
9
0
142 people solved
Jun 19, 2026
Snowflake logo
Snowflake
Medium
Software Engineer

Design a Cron Job Scheduler

Design a distributed cron job scheduler — a service that triggers user-defined jobs on recurring, cron-style schedules. Assume worker (execution) capa...

System Design
71
0
698 people solved
Apr 12, 2026
OpenAI logo
OpenAI
Medium
Software Engineer

Design a Tier-Aware AI Video Generation Service

Design a Tier-Aware AI Video Generation Service Prompt Design a service that accepts a generation request, runs an expensive video-generation workflow...

System Design
6
0
50 people solved
Jul 1, 2026
Jane Street logo
Jane Street
Easy
Software Engineer

Design exchange–trading system message flow

Design the message contract and flow between a firm's trading system (OMS/EMS) and an external exchange. Assume: - The trading system sends orders and...

System Design
120
0
838 people solved
Dec 15, 2025
Optiver logo
Optiver
Hard
Software EngineerIntern Locked

Design low-latency trading infrastructure

This question evaluates understanding of low-latency trading system architecture, networking and protocol trade-offs (TCP/IP vs UDP), time synchroniza...

System Design
142
0
1705 people solved
Dec 5, 2025
Affirm logo
Affirm
Medium
Software Engineer

Design Installment-Loan Payment Processing

Design Installment-Loan Payment Processing Design a payment-processing system for an existing user's active installment loan. A payment may be initiat...

System Design
9
0
79 people solved
Apr 19, 2026
Oracle logo
Oracle
Medium
Software Engineer

Design an Enterprise Remote Browser Isolation System

Design an Enterprise Remote Browser Isolation System Design a system that runs browsing sessions on isolated virtual nodes and streams the result to e...

System Design
0
0
5 people solved
Jul 26, 2026
Whatnot logo
Whatnot
Medium
Software Engineer Locked

Design a Charity Donation Website

This question evaluates system architecture and reliability engineering skills, focusing on payment integration, asynchronous processing, idempotency,...

System Design
23
0
179 people solved
May 30, 2026

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