Introduction:
FAANG companies (Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and Google) are renowned for their rigorous software engineering interviews, with system design questions playing a crucial role. These questions assess your ability to design large-scale, scalable, and maintainable systems. In this blog post, we present 10 real-life system design questions that you may encounter during FAANG interviews, along with the type of system architecture each question represents and a brief description of aspects to consider while designing the system.
In this question, you will be asked to design a social media platform that can handle massive amounts of data and scale to accommodate millions or billions of users. Focus on aspects like data modeling, data storage, feed generation, and search functionality. This will demonstrate your understanding of distributed systems, databases, and caching strategies.
Design a URL shortening service like bit.ly (Web Service)
This question tests your ability to design a scalable web service with high availability. Consider factors like RESTful API design, database schema, caching strategies, and load balancing. You will need to demonstrate your knowledge of data structures, hashing algorithms, and distributed systems.
Design a distributed key-value store (Distributed Systems)
This question assesses your understanding of distributed systems, data replication, and consistency models. You should discuss topics like sharding, partitioning, CAP theorem, and consistency levels. This will help demonstrate your ability to design a scalable and fault-tolerant system.
Design a rate limiter (System Control)
In this question, you are required to design a system that can limit the number of requests per user or IP address within a specific time frame. You may need to discuss token bucket algorithms, sliding window algorithms, and distributed rate limiting. This will show your understanding of system control and resource management.
Design a web crawler (Web Scraping and Parallelism)
This question assesses your understanding of web scraping, parallelism, and resource management. Candidates should be prepared to discuss topics like HTML parsing, robots.txt, URL frontier, and managing duplicate URLs. This will demonstrate your ability to design a system that can efficiently crawl and process web content.
Design a recommendation system like Netflix (Recommendation Systems)
This question evaluates your ability to design algorithms that can analyze user behavior and provide relevant recommendations. Topics may include collaborative filtering, content-based filtering, matrix factorization, and deep learning-based approaches. This will help show your knowledge of machine learning and data analysis.
Design a search engine or search autocomplete system (Search Algorithms and Optimization)
This question tests your understanding of search algorithms, indexing, and performance optimization. You may need to discuss topics like inverted indices, term frequency-inverse document frequency (TF-IDF), and search ranking algorithms. This will demonstrate your ability to design an efficient and effective search system.
Design a load balancer (Load Balancing and High Availability)
This question assesses your ability to distribute incoming network traffic across multiple servers to ensure high availability and reliability. Candidates should be familiar with techniques like round-robin, least connections, and consistent hashing. This will show your knowledge of network architecture and system reliability.
Design a cache system (Caching Strategies and Performance Optimization)
This question evaluates your understanding of caching strategies and their impact on system performance. You may need to discuss topics like cache eviction policies, distributed caching, and cache synchronization. This will help demonstrate your ability to optimize system performance through effective caching.
Design a messaging or notification system like WhatsApp (Messaging and Notification Systems)
This question tests your ability to design a system for sending messages or notifications to users in a reliable and scalable manner. Considerations include message queues, message brokers, and publish-subscribe patterns. This will demonstrate your understanding of communication protocols, data encryption, and real-time data processing.
Conclusion:
Preparing for system design questions is an essential part of FAANG interviews. The real-life system design questions listed in this blog post can help you get started with understanding the types of questions you might encounter and the aspects to focus on while designing these systems. Remember that interviewers might ask variations of these questions or combine concepts, so it's essential to be adaptable and ready to demonstrate your problem-solving abilities. Good luck with your FAANG interviews!
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