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Interview Compass

TOPIC

System design

These are the same questions found in the library, grouped here by the capability each one mainly examines.

88 questions

Questions 51–88 of 88 on this page.

A · Professional problem solving and implementation30

An admin console must retain operation records that cannot be casually altered, support queries by actor and object, and handle years of growth. How would you design writes, indexes, and retention?System design
In an admin console, inserts and deletes while paging by creation time cause duplicate or missing rows. How would you compare offset and cursor pagination and define the consistency expectation?System design
An API runs across multiple instances, and a local request limiter makes the total allowance grow with each instance. How would you design request-rate controls for bursts, accuracy, and failures, and where would you keep their state?System design
Design a service that lets several product teams submit tasks to run after a specified time; tasks may be canceled, rescheduled, or submitted more than once. How would you divide the data model and execution components?System design
Several services read feature flags and audience rules on request paths. How would you design the control plane and local evaluation so behavior remains predictable when the control service fails?System design
A high-traffic service must move a critical table to a new model without pausing reads or writes. How would you organize the migration stages and verify a safe cutover?System design
A collaborative tool shows who is online and where they are editing. Brief delay is acceptable, but disconnected members must not remain online indefinitely. How would you design updates and expiry?System design
A product needs to send transactional and optional marketing notifications to tens of millions of users, who can change channel preferences at any time. How would you design the sending process?System design
A global service must enable different features and retention rules by region while headquarters still needs an overall operational view. How would you divide configuration, enforcement, and aggregation?System design
A search service must change tokenization and ranking features without long result gaps or a major increase in write latency. How would you evolve the index?System design
A subscription product includes trials, renewals, grace periods, refunds, and family sharing. How would you design entitlement checks so several services receive consistent, traceable results?System design
A usage-based API product must combine request events from multiple regions into customer bills and allow later corrections. How would you design the usage-data processing flow?System design
A multi-tenant platform must send event notifications (webhooks) to customer systems. How would you design delivery and retries when a client is unavailable for a long time?System design
Several tenants share an asynchronous job platform, and some submit many long-running tasks. How would you design scheduling, isolation, quotas, and use logs, metrics, and call records to understand queue behavior?System design
Some objects become hot, degrading reads while writes must remain ordered. How would you divide caching, partitioning, and write coordination?System design
The business needs every state change to be traceable and safely replayable, but some old events lack fields. How would you design event versions, retention, and replay boundaries?System design
A multi-region service must preserve critical functions during a regional outage, but some data cannot tolerate conflicting overwrites. How would you choose degradation, replication, and recovery policies?System design
A real-time collaboration service has many long-lived connections, and slow clients accumulate updates. How would you choose between dropping, combining, limiting updates to slow clients, and resynchronizing?System design
Different teams own creation, editing, and review, and their form feedback is becoming inconsistent. How would you decide which patterns to standardize and which to keep distinct? How would you check loading, empty, error, and recovery states?System design
An entry service calls several downstream systems. One noncritical dependency occasionally slows down, exhausting request threads and affecting unrelated features. How would you design timeouts, concurrency isolation, degradation, and recovery?System design
A mobile upload of a large file may be interrupted, and users may retry by tapping again; the system also bills successful processing. How would you design chunks, validation, resumable state, finalization, and the billing point?System design
A business-rule correction requires recalculating historical records across several services, but some consumers have already sent notifications or performed external actions. How would you design correction events, impact lists, replay boundaries, and side-effect suppression?System design
After a dependency slows down, several callers increase retries at the same time; traffic doubles and the outage spreads. How would you design retry budgets, backoff, jitter, and cross-service coordination?System design
A live index needs a new shard key as data grows quickly and writes cannot stop. How would you plan old and new indexes and decide when to cut over?System design
A multi-tenant query platform shares a database pool. One tenant submits many complex reports and increases latency for others. How would you isolate and meter usage?System design
An admin API can change customer states in bulk. A script began calling it directly and caused broad changes. How would you redesign authorization and safeguards?System design
A user starts a large export and disconnects; access is revoked while the job runs. The job needs resumability without leaking data after revocation. How would you design it?System design
Product data lives in application, CDN, and client caches. After a price update, users see different values. How would you define refresh, versioning, and invalidation semantics?System design
A live dashboard uses event-time windows, while finance groups by settlement time and excludes unsettled transactions. A leader believes one report must be wrong. How would you explain and govern this?System design
Every read request is logged, driving cost up, while compliance requires evidence for sensitive actions. How would you tier collection and retention?System design

B · Business understanding and domain modeling1

Where does your project sit in the wider business? Who gives it input, who uses its results, and who is affected if it is late or wrong?Product and project model

C · Value judgment and direction setting4

D · Delivery and ongoing operations1

A new system must gradually replace a legacy one while both serve real users, with data and functionality switching in batches. How would you decompose the migration, validation points, and rollback conditions?Problem decomposition

F · People and organization building2