Instacart
Medium
Software EngineerDesign an inventory system
System Design
17
0
August 4, 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
Filter and sort
Databricks
Hard
Software EngineerIdentify and handle race conditions
System Design
18
0
September 6, 2025
Moveworks
Medium
Software EngineerDesign a car rental booking system
System Design
23
0
December 15, 2025
Salesforce
Medium
Software EngineerDesign a TikTok-like short video platform
System Design
12
0
March 1, 2026
Plaid
Easy
Software EngineerDesign a geo-distributed rate limiter
System Design
20
0
February 4, 2026
Datadog
Hard
Software EngineerDesign log-query stream processor
System Design
38
0
July 29, 2025
Anthropic
Medium
Software EngineerDesign a one-to-one chat system
System Design
11
0
March 28, 2026
Airbnb
Hard
Software EngineerDesign API for split-stay combinations
System Design
25
0
September 6, 2025
Netflix
Medium
Software EngineerDesign an ads data model
System Design
24
0
September 30, 2025
OpenAI
Hard
Software EngineerDesign a CI/CD system with live log streaming
System Design
15
0
December 15, 2025
Anthropic
Hard
Software EngineerDesign a scalable network I/O service
System Design
16
0
September 6, 2025
Anthropic
Hard
Software EngineerImplement a thread-safe producer–consumer buffer
System Design
20
0
July 31, 2025
Databricks
Hard
Software EngineerDesign a Visa-like payment processing system
System Design
11
0
February 12, 2026
Fanatics
Hard
Software EngineerDesign a retail trading platform
System Design
19
0
September 6, 2025
Reddit
Medium
Machine Learning EngineerDesign a video recommendation system
ML System Design
18
0
February 12, 2026
Roblox
Medium
Software EngineerDesign a rate limiter
System Design
14
0
January 22, 2026
Airbnb
Hard
Software EngineerDesign a fast host listing metrics page
System Design
14
0
December 20, 2025
Netflix
Easy
Software EngineerDesign a crash-resilient file system
System Design
9
0
December 16, 2025
OpenAI
Hard
Software EngineerDesign a ChatGPT-like web chat UI
System Design
22
0
January 2, 2026
Anthropic
Hard
Machine Learning EngineerDesign an inference routing and scheduling layer
ML System Design
18
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.