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50
System Design
Interview Questions
Seen in ML Engineer and AI Engineer interviews
at FAANGs, startups and consulting firms
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Core Concepts
1. Scalability: Understand horizontal vs. vertical scaling, and
how to design scalable systems.
2. Load Balancing: Concepts behind tools like Nginx, HAProxy.
3. Caching: Mechanisms (e.g., Redis, Memcached) and
strategies (LRU cache, write-through, write-back).
4. Databases: Differences between SQL (e.g., PostgreSQL,
MySQL) and NoSQL (e.g., MongoDB, Cassandra). ACID vs.
BASE properties.
5. Consistency vs. Availability: CAP theorem.
6. Distributed Systems: Challenges (e.g., network failures,
partition tolerance) and patterns (e.g., leader election).
7. Message Queues: Usage and tools like RabbitMQ, Kafka.
8. Microservices: Benefits, challenges, and communication
methods (e.g., REST, gRPC).
9. API Design: RESTful services, rate limiting, versioning.
10. Replication & Sharding: Strategies to distribute data.
11. Failover and Recovery: Strategies to handle system failures.
12. Monitoring & Logging: Tools and strategies for maintaining
system health.
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Interview Questions
1. Design a parking lot management system.
2. Design an API rate limiter.
3. How would you handle security concerns in a distributed system?
4. Design a system to handle millions of events per second.
5. Design an online booking system like Airbnb.
6. How would you design for high availability in a critical application?
7. Design a photo-sharing service like Instagram.
8. Discuss the CAP theorem and its implications for system design.
9. Design a system for processing big data in real-time.
10. How would you design a distributed file storage system like
Google's GFS or Hadoop's HDFS?
11. Design an ad-serving platform.
12. Explain strategies to detect and prevent fraud in an online
transaction system.
13. Design a system for real-time analytics.
14. How would you design a trending topics feature for a platform like
Twitter?
15. Design an email sending service.
16. How would you ensure data consistency in a microservices
architecture?
17. Design a calendar system.
18. Discuss strategies for zero-downtime deployments in critical
systems.
19. Design a system for tracking user actions on a website.
20. How would you optimize for read-heavy vs write-heavy systems?
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Interview Questions
21. Design a URL shortening service like Bitly.
22. Design a system for autocomplete functionality.
23. Design a distributed caching system.
24. How would you design a global content delivery network (CDN)?
25. Design a rate limiter for APIs.
26. How would you design a logging and monitoring system?
27. Design an online multiplayer game backend.
28. How would you handle versioning in a microservices architecture?
29. Design a system to efficiently find 10 top selling products on an
online marketplace.
30. Explain how you'd handle data replication and consistency across
distributed databases.
31. Design a recommendation system like the ones on Amazon or
Netflix.
32. How would you handle schema migrations in a large-scale database
system?
33. Design a notification service for a real-time application.
34. How would you design a chat application like WhatsApp or Slack?
35. Design a search engine.
36. How would you design the backend for a social network like
Facebook or Twitter?
37. Design a distributed message queue system.
38. Explain the design behind a load balancer.
39. Design a key-value store.
40. How would you handle hotkeys in a caching system?
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Interview Questions
41. Design a real-time traffic reporting system.
42. Discuss database sharding strategies.
43. Design an e-commerce checkout system.
44. How would you handle a system failure in the middle of a
transaction?
45. Design an order management system for an e-commerce platform.
46. Discuss strategies for rolling back a faulty deployment.
47. Design a ride-sharing service like Uber or Lyft.
48. How would you design a system to support multiple languages and
regions?
49. Design a web crawler.
50. How would you handle database connection pooling in a large-scale
application?
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