Questions 201–267 of 267

  1. How would you scale an e-commerce food-ordering system when its database writer is overloaded in production?

    Asked once · last asked Sep 21 · Design · Senior

  2. For an e-commerce application, what database would you choose, and what would you choose for a banking application?

    Asked once · last asked Sep 21 · Design · Senior

  3. How would you balance immediate consistency against throughput and reliability when making a technical trade-off?

    Asked once · last asked Sep 21 · Scenario · Senior

  4. How would you design data access for a search feature, including tables, indexes, query strategy, and consistent pagination as data changes?

    Asked once · last asked Sep 22 · Design · Senior

  5. Can you describe an end-to-end data pipeline architecture, from ingestion to data consumption?

    Asked once · last asked Sep 22 · Design · Mid-level

  6. How would you choose between strong consistency, eventual consistency, or an intermediate model for a system, and how would that choice influence its design?

    Asked once · last asked Sep 23 · Concept · Senior

    Other ways it was asked
    • “What type of data consistency did the system require—strong, eventual, or something in between—and how did that influence your design?”

  7. A clinician opens a patient planning screen. While they are editing, another user changes the same planning data from another workstation. How would you prevent the first user from accidentally overwriting the second user's changes?

    Asked once · last asked Sep 23 · Scenario · Senior

  8. When would you consider a distributed or sharded database architecture?

    Asked once · last asked Sep 23 · Concept · Senior

  9. How do you handle database scaling when a single table or entity grows rapidly?

    Asked once · last asked Sep 24 · Design · Senior

  10. How do you ensure BI solutions are scalable, perform well, are easy to use, and maintain data quality?

    Asked once · last asked Sep 24 · Design · Senior

  11. How would you design a data solution using Microsoft Fabric, including its components, integrations, and workflow?

    Asked once · last asked Sep 24 · Design · Mid-level

    Other ways it was asked
    • “Can you describe a project where you used Microsoft Fabric, including the components, integrations, and workflow involved?”

  12. If you are processing 1,000 records and only three are invalid, would you roll back the entire operation? How would you design the processing and error handling?

    Asked once · last asked Sep 25 · Scenario · Senior

  13. How do concurrency control mechanisms fit into a groupware system?

    Asked once · last asked Sep 27 · Concept · Mid-level

  14. How would you retrieve nearby vehicles for a map-based mobile app?

    Asked once · last asked Sep 29 · Scenario · Mid-level

  15. How do you manage a transaction that spans multiple databases in a Spring Boot application?

    Asked once · last asked Sep 30 · Scenario · Senior

  16. How would you rename a column in a production leads table with 10,000,000 rows without downtime or data loss?

    Asked once · last asked Oct 1 · Scenario · Senior

  17. How would you choose a database for a project hosted on Azure while keeping the option to self-host PostgreSQL?

    Asked once · last asked Oct 2 · Design · Senior

  18. What are the advantages and disadvantages of using a managed database instead of hosting and operating one yourself?

    Asked once · last asked Oct 2 · Concept · Mid-level

  19. How would you implement full-text search for customer documents and search across system logs and traces in Azure?

    Asked once · last asked Oct 2 · Design · Senior

  20. How would you handle an API that becomes slow when the database grows from 5,000,000 to 100,000,000 records?

    Asked once · last asked Oct 5 · Scenario · Senior

  21. When a commerce application uses Redis and PostgreSQL, what data should be cached in Redis, and which data should remain authoritative in PostgreSQL?

    Asked once · last asked Oct 5 · Design · Mid-level

  22. How would you design a migration and select users for efficient processing at a scale of one trillion users?

    Asked once · last asked Oct 6 · Design · Senior

  23. How would you efficiently process a dataset containing two billion users?

    Asked once · last asked Oct 6 · Design · Senior

  24. How would you architect an application that ingests large CSV, TSV, or similar text files into AWS, processes them as soon as they land, applies business logic, and loads different database tables?

    Asked once · last asked Oct 7 · Design · Senior

  25. How would you use Kafka to handle the transfer of thousands of files within a short period?

    Asked once · last asked Oct 7 · Scenario · Senior

    Other ways it was asked
    • “How would Kafka handle thousands of files arriving within a short period?”

  26. When would distributed transactions be appropriate in a file-ingestion pipeline that updates multiple database tables?

    Asked once · last asked Oct 7 · Scenario · Senior

  27. What are the trade-offs of reading and processing a file directly rather than using an event-driven pipeline?

    Asked once · last asked Oct 7 · Scenario · Senior

  28. How would you design a system's business logic to prevent two pickers from being assigned a total of 12 units from one bin when only 10 are available?

    Asked once · last asked Oct 11 · Scenario · Mid-level

  29. How would you design a data pipeline that isolates failures and prevents interruptions from causing duplicate data?

    Asked once · last asked Oct 12 · Design · Senior

  30. If you add a cache like Redis in front of the database for get user by ID, what rules would you use to keep cached data from going stale after updates?

    Asked once · last asked Oct 14 · Scenario · Mid-level

  31. When should a logistics batch program start in a production environment?

    Asked once · last asked Oct 15 · Scenario · Mid-level

  32. What storage approach would you recommend for mixed data, including videos and JSON-based metadata, and why?

    Asked once · last asked Oct 19 · Design · Senior

    Other ways it was asked
    • “We have mixed types of data, including videos and JSON-based metadata. What do you recommend, and why?”

  33. How would you approach database scaling, and what would make you choose read replicas over sharding or vice versa?

    Asked once · last asked Oct 20 · Design · Mid-level

  34. How would you build automated data ingestion and transformation for a distributed lead-generation platform?

    Asked once · last asked Oct 21 · Design · Mid-level

    Other ways it was asked
    • “What data sources might a lead-generation platform ingest, and how would you process and transform that data automatically?”

  35. How would you migrate from MySQL to PostgreSQL and synchronize user data without data loss or downtime?

    Asked once · last asked Oct 22 · Design · Senior

  36. What exact data would you persist for an interrupted checkout?

    Asked once · last asked Oct 23 · Design · Senior

  37. What are the advantages and disadvantages of Pure Storage?

    Asked once · last asked Jan 6 · Concept · Mid-level

  38. What factors guide your choice of databases for a backend project?

    Asked once · last asked Oct 23 · Design · Mid-level

  39. What database constraints and state-transition rules would you use to ensure a purchase is finalized exactly once despite duplicate webhooks?

    Asked once · last asked Oct 23 · Design · Senior

  40. How would a pessimistic limit check work in an order-processing flow?

    Asked once · last asked Mar 19 · Design · Senior

  41. What is scaling in a database?

    Asked once · last asked Mar 27 · Concept · Junior

  42. Should an image management system store both original images and thumbnail images?

    Asked once · last asked Apr 13 · Design · Mid-level

  43. What are the basic operations an object storage service should support?

    Asked once · last asked Apr 22 · Concept · Junior

  44. How would you divide and manage the data-processing pipeline across four domains?

    Asked once · last asked May 18 · Design · Senior

  45. What infrastructure do you need for Redis?

    Asked once · last asked May 25 · Design · Mid-level

  46. What tool or service would let an external consumer read data from your lakehouse?

    Asked once · last asked Jun 9 · Design · Mid-level

  47. How should a team weigh an existing technology stack and early design decisions when selecting a database?

    Asked once · last asked Jun 18 · Scenario · Senior

  48. How does a blockchain work, and what technologies can be used to build one?

    Asked once · last asked Jun 26 · Concept · Mid-level

  49. What are some of the core principles that underpin a data mesh?

    Asked once · last asked Jul 16 · Concept · Mid-level

  50. In a data mesh, can a consumer of one data product be another data product or domain?

    Asked once · last asked Jul 16 · Concept · Mid-level

  51. What is a rollback in a blockchain?

    Asked once · last asked Jul 8 · Concept · Junior

    Other ways it was asked
    • “What else happens during a blockchain rollback?”

  52. What is the role of a metastore database in a data platform?

    Asked once · last asked Jul 16 · Concept · Mid-level

  53. What is versioning in object storage?

    Asked once · last asked Jul 16 · Concept · Junior

  54. What would populate the Redis cache?

    Asked once · last asked Jul 20 · Design · Mid-level

  55. How would you partition a very large dataset?

    Asked once · last asked Jul 22 · Scenario · Mid-level

  56. How would you handle 10,000,000 student records efficiently?

    Asked once · last asked Jul 27 · Scenario · Senior

  57. Considering the evolving landscape of database technologies, how do you see semantic search tools like pgvector impacting future database architectures?

    Asked once · last asked Jul 30 · Concept · Senior

  58. How would you choose a storage solution for image data in a computer vision project?

    Asked once · last asked Aug 3 · Scenario · Mid-level

  59. How would you approach understanding the design of a database whose internals you are unfamiliar with?

    Asked once · last asked Aug 21 · Scenario · Mid-level

  60. What are different ways to implement synchronization between database replicas?

    Asked once · last asked Aug 21 · Concept · Mid-level

  61. What is a consensus algorithm or consensus protocol?

    Asked once · last asked Aug 21 · Concept · Mid-level

  62. How do you handle communication between an application and a database?

    Asked once · last asked Aug 25 · Concept · Mid-level

  63. How would you make a data pipeline accessible to internal analysts?

    Asked once · last asked Sep 10 · Design · Mid-level

  64. What general rules do you follow when selecting a database for an application?

    Asked once · last asked Sep 21 · Concept · Mid-level

    Other ways it was asked
    • “What general rules do you follow to choose between a SQL and a NoSQL database for an application?”

  65. What database would you choose for an application that needs to scale from 100 users to millions, and why?

    Asked once · last asked Sep 21 · Design · Mid-level

  66. How would you generate a transaction ID?

    Asked once · last asked Oct 1 · Concept · Mid-level

  67. What is event sourcing, and how can it be used in a software project?

    Asked once · last asked Oct 21 · Concept · Mid-level

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More System Design interview questions

How this list is made

Every question here was asked by a real interviewer in a real job interview that a candidate ran MeetAssist in. After the call, the interviewer's questions are pulled from the transcript. Practice sessions, tests, exams and anything that was not a job interview are dropped.

Questions are rewritten so they make sense on their own: names of people, employers and clients are removed, and speech-to-text mistakes are fixed. Small talk, logistics and questions about one candidate's own résumé are left out. Rephrasings of the same question are merged, and the count is the number of different interviews it came up in.

The interviews come from candidates who use MeetAssist, so they lean towards software, data and AI roles: the shares describe these interviews, not every System Design interview. Answers to the most asked questions are written and checked by an editor; a "common mistake" is shown only when reviews of real answers in these interviews show it, with the count.

942 interviews, 495 candidates, Oct 2025 to Oct 2026. Updated every month with new interviews.