System Design Practice Problems
Master system design interviews with enhanced practice problems that emphasize requirements gathering, back-of-envelope calculations, and real-world trade-offs.
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Design URL Shortener
MediumSystem Design PracticePractice system design: Build a URL shortener like bit.ly with analytics, custom URLs, and scaling.
Design Chat System
HardSystem Design PracticeDesign a chat system like WhatsApp or Slack: real-time messaging, presence, and group chat at scale.
Design Video Streaming
HardSystem Design PracticeDesign a video streaming platform like YouTube or Netflix: CDN, encoding, and adaptive streaming.
Design Social Media Feed
HardSystem Design PracticeDesign a social media feed like Twitter or Instagram: timeline generation, ranking, and real-time updates.
Design Ride Sharing
HardSystem Design PracticeDesign a ride-sharing system like Uber or Lyft: matching, pricing, ETAs, and real-time tracking.
Design Search Engine
HardSystem Design PracticeDesign a search engine: crawling, indexing, ranking, and serving search results at scale.
Design Payment System
HardSystem Design PracticeDesign a payment processing system: transactions, ledgers, compliance, and fraud detection.
Design Notification System
MediumSystem Design PracticeDesign a notification system: email, SMS, push notifications with delivery guarantees and preferences.
Design Distributed Cache
MediumSystem Design PracticeDesign a file storage system like Dropbox or Google Drive: sync, sharing, and versioning.
Design a Recommendation System
HardML Systems PracticeDesign a recommendation system like Netflix: collaborative filtering, feature engineering, and ML pipeline.
Design a Fraud Detection System
HardML Systems PracticeDesign a real-time fraud detection system: ML pipeline, feature engineering, and production deployment.
Design an Ad Targeting Platform
HardML Systems PracticeDesign an ad targeting platform: CTR prediction, real-time bidding, and ML optimization.
Design a Search Ranking System
HardML Systems PracticeDesign a search ranking system: learning to rank, feature engineering, and relevance optimization.
Design a Computer Vision Pipeline
MediumML Systems PracticeDesign a computer vision pipeline: image processing, model serving, and batch inference at scale.
Design an ML Feature Store
MediumML Systems PracticeDesign an ML feature store: feature computation, offline/online store, and data lineage.
Design a RAG System
MediumGenAI Systems PracticeDesign a RAG system like Perplexity: vector databases, embedding models, and LLM integration.
Design an AI Code Assistant
HardGenAI Systems PracticeDesign an AI code assistant like GitHub Copilot: code completion, context extraction, and latency optimization.
Design a Conversational AI Platform
MediumGenAI Systems PracticeDesign a conversational AI platform: LLM orchestration, multi-turn context, and safety guardrails.
Design a Content Moderation System
HardGenAI Systems PracticeDesign an AI content moderation system: multi-modal AI, safety classification, and human-in-the-loop.
Design Gmail Smart Compose
MediumGenAI Systems PracticeDesign Gmail Smart Compose: real-time text completion, context understanding, and low-latency ML serving.
Design Google Translate
HardGenAI Systems PracticeDesign Google Translate: neural machine translation, multilingual models, and real-time language processing.
Design Image Captioning System
MediumGenAI Systems PracticeDesign an image captioning system: vision-language models, multimodal architectures, and caption generation.
Design Text-to-Image Generation
HardGenAI Systems PracticeDesign a text-to-image system like DALL-E: diffusion models, prompt understanding, and image generation at scale.
Design ML System: Duplicate Detection
HardML Systems PracticeDesign an ML system for duplicate detection: embedding strategies, vector search, continuous learning, and production deployment.
Design ML System: Dataset Diversity Dashboard
MediumML Systems PracticeDesign an ML system for dataset diversity dashboard: analytics pipeline, data quality metrics, and monitoring infrastructure.
Design GenAI System: Face Generation
HardGenAI Systems PracticeDesign a face generation system: GAN/diffusion models, safety filters, and production scaling for synthetic face creation.
Design GenAI System: Image Synthesis
HardGenAI Systems PracticeDesign an image synthesis system: advanced diffusion models, style control, and high-resolution generation pipeline.
Design GenAI System: Professional Headshot Generation
MediumGenAI Systems PracticeDesign a professional headshot generation system: face-aware diffusion, style consistency, and commercial applications.
Design GenAI System: Text-to-Video Generation
HardGenAI Systems PracticeDesign a text-to-video generation system: temporal diffusion models, consistency controls, and large-scale video synthesis.
Enhanced Interview Approach
Our practice problems follow a systematic 5-step interview approach that mirrors real technical interviews:
Realistic interviewer-candidate dialogue to gather requirements and constraints.
Explicit calculations for scale, storage, bandwidth, and infrastructure sizing.
High-level architecture, API design, data modeling, and component interactions.
Critical component analysis, scaling strategies, and failure handling.
Explicit discussion of design decisions, alternatives, and their implications.
Additional sections for model selection, feature engineering, and AI-specific concerns.