System design interview questions by company

Most asked design questions

• Notification system

  Asked at Apple, LinkedIn, Airbnb, Atlassian, Goldman Sachs, Flipkart, Razorpay

  Reported as: Design a push notification service · Notification system · Watchlist and notification system

• Movie booking

  Asked at Amazon, Apple, Airbnb, Salesforce, Oracle, Swiggy

  Reported as: Design a hotel booking system · Design a ticket booking system · Booking system preventing double-booking

• Search autocomplete

  Asked at Google, Meta, LinkedIn, Oracle, Adobe

  Reported as: Design search autocomplete / typeahead · Design search typeahead · Typeahead / autocomplete

• Job scheduler

  Asked at Google, Goldman Sachs, Oracle, Flipkart, Razorpay

  Reported as: Design a distributed job scheduler · Task scheduler with dependencies and priorities (LLD) · Job scheduler

• Rate limiter

  Asked at Amazon, Stripe, Atlassian, Salesforce, Swiggy

  Reported as: Design an API rate limiter · Rate limiter / API gateway · Distributed rate limiter for a public API

  Practise on the design board

• WhatsApp

  Asked at Microsoft, Meta, Apple, Uber, Airbnb

  Reported as: Design a chat and presence service · Design Messenger / WhatsApp · Design message delivery

  Practise on the design board

• Google Docs

  Asked at Google, Microsoft, Meta, Atlassian

  Reported as: Design Google Docs (collaborative editing) · Design a collaborative document editor · Design a collaborative editor

• Google Drive

  Asked at Microsoft, Apple, Uber, Razorpay

  Reported as: Design a cross-device file sync service · Design photo sync across devices · Design Dropbox

  Practise on the design board

• News Feed

  Asked at Meta, LinkedIn, Salesforce, Walmart Global Tech

  Reported as: Design the News Feed · Home feed · Celebrity fan-out in a social feed

  Practise on the design board

• E-commerce (Amazon)

  Asked at Amazon, Oracle, PhonePe

  Reported as: Design the store front page to handle 10x traffic · Fix bottlenecks in an add-to-cart flow · Product catalog search with sponsored ranking (machine coding)

• Payment system

  Asked at Stripe, Goldman Sachs, Flipkart

  Reported as: Idempotent ledger service · Real-time trade processing system · Ledger for transactions from many services

• Web crawler

  Asked at Google, Apple

  Reported as: Design a web crawler · Design a peer-to-peer web crawler

• Monitoring and alerting

  Asked at Microsoft, PhonePe

  Reported as: Design a telemetry / log ingestion pipeline · Real-time cluster monitoring

• Top K (trending)

  Asked at Meta, Atlassian

  Reported as: Design trending topics / top-K · Tagging system with popular tags

• Digital wallet

  Asked at Uber, Swiggy

  Reported as: Design Splitwise · Expense sharing like Splitwise (LLD)

• Google Search

  Asked at LinkedIn, PhonePe

  Reported as: Search system · Web search engine

• Flash sale

  Asked at Goldman Sachs, Flipkart

  Reported as: Flash-sale backend under heavy load · Flash-sale inventory at big-sale scale

• URL shortener

  Asked at Oracle, Adobe

  Reported as: URL shortener

  Practise on the design board

• Food delivery

  Asked at Flipkart, Swiggy

  Reported as: Food ordering system (machine coding) · Real-time delivery-partner tracking

• Google Maps

  Asked at Google

  Reported as: Design Google Maps

• YouTube

  Asked at Google

  Reported as: Count YouTube video views

• Instagram

  Asked at Meta

  Reported as: Design Instagram / Stories

• Live comments

  Asked at Meta

  Reported as: Design live comments

• Ad click aggregator

  Asked at Netflix

  Reported as: Ad frequency capping service

• Uber

  Asked at Uber

  Reported as: Show every driver on a map in real time

• Yelp / proximity

  Asked at Airbnb

  Reported as: Listing search by location and dates

• Spotify

  Asked at Walmart Global Tech

  Reported as: Music streaming app

How to answer any design question: the LADDER method · How the design round is scored

Which levels get a design round

Questions people ask