Design an internal interest-matching platform

Q: Design an internal interest-matching platform

This is a System Design interview question from Palantir for Software Engineer roles. View the full question and solution on PracHub.

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Question

System Design Prompt: Internal Employee Interest Matching Platform

Context

Design an internal-only platform that connects employees with similar interests to foster collaboration, mentorship, and community. Assume a typical enterprise environment with SSO, an HR directory, and tens of thousands of employees. The system should provide near real-time updates when interests change.

Requirements

Features
1. Profile creation and editing
2. Interest tagging (free text with normalization and a suggested taxonomy)
3. Discovery and search (by tags, location, team, etc.)
4. Matching/recommendations (who should I connect with?)
5. Messaging (1:1 and small group)
Data model and storage choices
APIs (profile, interests, discovery, recommendations, messaging)
Matching and ranking approach (signals, algorithm)
Privacy and access controls (internal-only visibility, role/attribute-based)
Cold start strategy
High-level architecture (services, databases/search indices, cache, event/queue)
Scaling plan to tens of thousands of employees with near real-time updates
Monitoring/metrics and abuse prevention

Design an internal interest-matching platform

System Design Prompt: Internal Employee Interest Matching Platform

Context

Requirements

Solution (Locked)

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