Palantir
Medium
Software EngineerDesign a compliant multi-tenant analytics platform
System Design
14
0
January 6, 2026
Scalability Interview Questions
Scalability questions test whether you can design systems that handle growing load without degrading performance.
Expect questions on horizontal vs vertical scaling, database sharding, data partitioning strategies, and capacity planning.
Interviewers look for awareness of bottlenecks, trade-offs between consistency and throughput, and practical experience with scaling patterns.
911Questions
163Companies
Easy 42 • Medium 378 • Hard 479Difficulty mix
Common scalability interview patterns
- Horizontal vs vertical scaling trade-offs
- Database sharding strategies (hash, range, geographic)
- Read replicas and write scaling
- Stateless service design for horizontal scaling
- Auto-scaling policies and capacity planning
- Data partitioning and rebalancing
Scalability interview questions
Filter and sort
Robinhood
Easy
Software EngineerDesign a distributed job scheduler service
System Design
14
0
December 8, 2025
DoorDash
Easy
Software EngineerDesign an alert notification system
System Design
8
0
January 28, 2026
HubSpot
Hard
Software EngineerDesign a near-real-time weather API
System Design
9
0
September 6, 2025
Rippling
Medium
Software EngineerDesign a delivery cost aggregator
System Design
15
0
August 7, 2025
Sprinter Health
Medium
Software EngineerDesign a scalable game app store
System Design
14
0
December 8, 2025
SoFi
Hard
Software EngineerDesign a Random Number Generation API
System Design
14
0
July 16, 2025
Databricks
Hard
Software EngineerDesign a Hierarchical File System
System Design
11
0
March 15, 2026
Rippling
Medium
Software EngineerDesign a Scalable News Feed
System Design
13
0
March 12, 2026
SoFi
Medium
Software EngineerDesign market price change notifications
System Design
8
0
February 4, 2026
OpenAI
Hard
Software EngineerDesign multi-tenant CI/CD platform
System Design
7
0
September 6, 2025
Anthropic
Hard
Software EngineerIdentify and mitigate deduplication program risks
System Design
14
0
August 14, 2025
Discord
Medium
Software EngineerDesign leader election using Redis leases
System Design
13
0
October 25, 2025
Discord
Easy
Software EngineerDesign Slack-like chat system
System Design
12
0
March 1, 2026
Rippling
Hard
Software EngineerDesign a real-time delivery dashboard
System Design
11
0
September 6, 2025
Axon
Hard
Software EngineerDesign a tamper-evident video chain-of-custody audit system
System Design
13
0
July 15, 2025
Anthropic
Hard
Software EngineerSchedule instructions on a VLIW pipeline
System Design
14
0
September 6, 2025
Roblox
Hard
Software EngineerDesign a real-time favorites service at scale
System Design
10
0
August 12, 2025
Rippling
Medium
Software EngineerExtend rules for trip-level aggregates and outputs
System Design
8
0
August 7, 2025
Anthropic
Hard
Software EngineerDesign a concurrent web crawler
System Design
14
0
September 6, 2025
Common mistakes in scalability discussions
- Jumping to scaling solutions before estimating actual load
- Ignoring the consistency implications of horizontal scaling
- Overlooking hot partition problems in sharding schemes
- Not considering the operational complexity of distributed systems
- Assuming vertical scaling is always simpler
How scalability questions are evaluated
Structured reasoning about load estimation and bottleneck identification matters most.
Show awareness of trade-offs rather than presenting a single solution.
Discuss failure modes and how the system degrades under extreme load.