Optiver
Hard
Software EngineerDesign a topic-based news subscription system
System Design
18
0
September 6, 2025
Caching System Design Interview Questions
Caching questions test your understanding of how to reduce latency and database load using various caching strategies.
Expect questions on cache placement, eviction policies, write strategies, and the classic cache invalidation problem.
Interviewers evaluate whether you can design caching that improves performance without introducing stale data bugs.
890Questions
158Companies
Easy 42 • Medium 2 • Hard 456Difficulty mix
Common caching interview patterns
- Write-through vs write-back vs write-around caching
- Cache eviction policies (LRU, LFU, TTL)
- CDN caching for static and dynamic content
- Cache-aside (lazy loading) pattern
- Distributed caching with Redis or Memcached
- Cache warming and pre-computation
Caching interview questions
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Anthropic
Medium
Software EngineerHow would you scale batch image pipelines?
System Design
17
0
November 10, 2025
Anthropic
Medium
Machine Learning EngineerOptimize MapReduce performance
System Design
18
0
August 4, 2025
DoorDash
Medium
Software EngineerDesign a donation service for a 3‑day charity
System Design
18
0
January 18, 2026
Uber
Hard
Software EngineerDesign Uber Eats-style search function
System Design
24
0
November 11, 2025
Anthropic
Hard
Software EngineerHow do you handle an LLM agents interview?
ML System Design
27
0
March 1, 2026
Anthropic
Hard
Software EngineerDesign a high-concurrency LLM inference service
ML System Design
30
0
February 11, 2026
DoorDash
Medium
Software EngineerDesign API that aggregates three downstream APIs
System Design
18
0
November 4, 2025
Chime
Hard
Software EngineerDesign mobile check deposit system
System Design
28
0
July 27, 2025
Airbnb
Hard
Software EngineerDesign a real-time chat system with hot groups
System Design
35
0
January 22, 2026
Rippling
Medium
Software EngineerScale a rules engine for high traffic
System Design
20
0
February 12, 2026
Anthropic
Hard
Software EngineerDesign production-ready dedup service
System Design
15
0
September 6, 2025
Rippling
Hard
Software EngineerDesign a user behavior tracking system
System Design
34
0
February 11, 2026
Netflix
Medium
Software EngineerDesign ad frequency capping
System Design
27
0
April 15, 2026
OpenAI
Hard
Software EngineerDesign a crossword puzzle solver system
System Design
31
0
February 11, 2026
Databricks
Hard
Software EngineerDesign a KV store with QPS API
System Design
13
0
February 4, 2026
Instacart
Hard
Software EngineerDesign product catalog service
System Design
29
0
August 4, 2025
Harvey AI
Hard
Software EngineerDesign a production file storage service
System Design
21
0
September 6, 2025
Scale AI
Easy
Software EngineerDesign an LLM API pipeline
ML System Design
20
0
March 17, 2026
Anthropic
Medium
Software EngineerDescribe a Python design-and-coding approach in Colab
System Design
20
0
September 6, 2025
Common mistakes with caching
- Caching everything without analyzing access patterns
- Not handling cache misses gracefully (thundering herd)
- Ignoring cache invalidation complexity
- Setting TTLs too aggressively or too conservatively
- Forgetting that caches can fail and planning no fallback
How caching questions are evaluated
Explain when caching helps and when it adds complexity for little gain.
Discuss invalidation strategies and how you handle stale data.
Consider the cache in the context of the overall system, not in isolation.