System Design Interview Questions at FAANG Companies (2026)

System design interviews at FAANG companies are 45-60 minutes long. You are expected to design a large-scale system from a vague prompt, make reasonable assumptions, and discuss tradeoffs. The interviewer is evaluating your ability to think through problems, not whether you memorize architectures.

What FAANG companies actually ask

Based on the 853 system design questions on PracHub, certain topics repeat across companies. The most common ones, grouped by category:

Distributed Storage and Databases

Design a key-value store (Amazon, Google)
Design a distributed file system (Google, Meta)
Design a time-series database (Netflix, Amazon)
Design a caching system like Memcached/Redis (Google, Microsoft)

Real-time Systems

Design a chat/messaging system like WhatsApp (Meta, Microsoft)
Design a notification system (Uber, Amazon, Meta)
Design a real-time collaborative editor like Google Docs (Google)
Design a live video streaming system (Netflix, Meta)

Feed and Timeline

Design a news feed like Facebook/Instagram (Meta)
Design a tweet timeline like Twitter (Meta, Google)
Design a recommendation system (Netflix, Amazon, Meta)

Search and Discovery

Design a web search engine (Google)
Design an autocomplete/typeahead system (Google, Amazon)
Design a nearby places search (Google, Uber)

Infrastructure

Design a URL shortener like bit.ly (common at all companies)
Design a rate limiter (Google, Amazon)
Design a task scheduler (Amazon, Google)
Design a logging/monitoring system (Amazon, Netflix)

How the interview actually works

The interviewer gives you a vague prompt: "Design Instagram." That is intentionally underspecified. Your first job is to ask clarifying questions to narrow the scope.

Good clarifying questions:

Which features are in scope? (Feed? Stories? Messaging? Just the photo upload?)
What scale are we designing for? (Users, requests per second, data volume)
What are the most important qualities? (Latency? Consistency? Availability?)

After 5-10 minutes of scoping, you sketch a high-level architecture. Then you go deep on the hardest parts — usually data modeling, the main read/write paths, and scaling bottlenecks.

Company-specific patterns

Google tends to ask about distributed systems internals. They want you to know how consensus works, how to handle partitioning, and when to use different consistency models.

Meta leans heavily on social features: feeds, messaging, and content distribution at scale. They care about caching strategies and fan-out vs. fan-in tradeoffs.

Amazon focuses on service-oriented architecture and operational concerns. They want to know about failure modes, retries, idempotency, and how you would monitor the system.

Netflix asks about streaming, recommendations, and data pipelines. They care about availability over consistency and testing in production.

Microsoft covers a broad range. Their questions tend to be more traditional CS: design an elevator system, design a parking lot, design a library management system.

How to prepare

Practice with actual prompts, not just reading about architectures. You need to be able to talk through a design in real time.
Learn the building blocks: load balancers, CDNs, message queues, databases (SQL vs NoSQL), caching layers, consistent hashing.
Get comfortable with back-of-envelope math. "How much storage for 1 billion photos?" is a common warm-up.
Practice tradeoff discussions. There is never one right answer. The interviewer wants to see you weigh options.

PracHub has 853 system design questions tagged by company, including 94 from Meta, 48 from Amazon, and 32 from Google. Each includes the question as reported by candidates who went through the actual interview.