System Design Problems

Design a reliability program using SLOs (Service Level Objectives) to balance feature velocity with system stability.

Design an incident management process and supporting systems for a 24/7 operation with 99.99% uptime requirements.

Design an organizational structure for scaling an engineering team from 20 to 200 engineers while maintaining velocity.

As an Engineering Manager, design a system to identify, prioritize, and systematically address technical debt across your organization.

Design an internal developer platform strategy to improve developer productivity and standardize infrastructure across 50+ engineering teams.

As a Software Architect, design a framework for making and documenting architectural decisions across multiple teams.

Design a strategy to migrate a monolithic system serving 10M users to microservices with zero downtime.

Design a real-time collaborative document editing system like Google Docs supporting multiple concurrent editors.

Design a mapping and navigation service like Google Maps with features like map rendering, directions, and real-time traffic.

Design a distributed caching system like Redis or Memcached that can handle millions of requests per second.

Design a distributed rate limiting system to protect APIs from abuse and ensure fair usage.

Design a payment processing system like Stripe or PayPal handling transactions, refunds, and fraud detection.

Design a URL shortening service like bit.ly or TinyURL. The system should generate short URLs from long ones and redirect users.

Design a video streaming platform like Netflix or YouTube supporting video upload, transcoding, and adaptive streaming.

Design a ride-sharing application like Uber supporting real-time driver matching, location tracking, and fare calculation.

Design a microblogging platform like Twitter with features like posting tweets, following users, timeline, and trending topics.

Design a photo-sharing social network like Instagram with features like posting photos, following users, and a personalized feed.

Design a real-time messaging application like WhatsApp supporting 1:1 chat, group chat, media sharing, and delivery receipts.

Explain the differences between an API Gateway and a Load Balancer. When would you use each?

Explain different database sharding strategies and when to use each.

Explain the CAP theorem and its implications for distributed system design.

Compare horizontal scaling (scaling out) vs vertical scaling (scaling up). What are the trade-offs?

When should you choose microservices over a monolithic architecture? What are the trade-offs?