System design interviews are often the most intimidating part of the software engineering hiring process. Whether you’re applying to a backend role at a startup or aiming for a senior-level position at a FAANG company, system design questions will test your ability to architect scalable, reliable, and maintainable systems.
To help you prepare, we’ve built a comprehensive system design interview question bank, featuring realistic and challenging questions inspired by interviews at top companies like Google, Meta, Amazon, Netflix, ByteDance, and more.
🧠 What Makes Our Question Bank Stand Out
- Categorized by topic and system type
- Clear requirements and constraints
- Detailed breakdowns for APIs, components, trade-offs, and bottlenecks
- Covers both breadth and depth—from basic building blocks to complex distributed systems
Whether you’re a new grad or a staff engineer, you’ll find questions at the right level to stretch your thinking and sharpen your design instincts.
📂 Topics We Cover
Our question bank is organized by common themes and use cases that reflect actual interview patterns:
✅ Read-Heavy & Write-Heavy Systems
- Design a news feed (Meta)
- Design a collaborative document editor (Google Docs-style)
- Design a file storage system (Dropbox)
📈 Analytics & Logging Systems
- Design a real-time analytics system (Mixpanel-style)
- Design a log ingestion and query engine (like Splunk)
- Design a metrics dashboard system
📬 Messaging & Notification Systems
- Design a chat application (WhatsApp or Slack)
- Design a push notification system
- Design a real-time bidding system (Ads)
🛒 Transactional Systems
- Design a ride-sharing backend (Uber)
- Design an e-commerce checkout flow
- Design a ticket booking system (like Ticketmaster)
🎞️ Media & Streaming
- Design a video streaming service (Netflix)
- Design an image hosting service (Imgur or Google Photos)
🔑 Infrastructure Primitives
- Design a load balancer
- Design a rate limiter
- Design a key-value store (Redis)
🧩 Special Categories
- Design a feature flag system
- Design a scheduling service
- Design an API gateway
📋 Each Question Includes
- Functional and non-functional requirements
- Entity and component diagrams
- API design and request/response flows
- Scalability, performance, and trade-off analysis
- Failure scenarios and recovery strategies
You’re not just learning how to design systems—you’re learning how to think like an engineer who builds systems at scale.
🧭 Where to Start
Not sure which question to tackle first?
- Filter by system type (e.g., real-time, transactional, storage-heavy)
- Choose by company pattern (FAANG-style vs. startup-style)
- Use our starter questions if you're new to system design
System design interviews can be open-ended and ambiguous, but with the right preparation, you can walk in with a clear structure, strong mental models, and confidence.