1. Design a URL Shortener
Create short links, resolve them quickly and handle expiry without sending users to the wrong destination.
ClassicEasy
Guided practice
Start with a template. Work through each step. Ask Coach when you need a second opinion.
Classic designs 38
Ordered by design numberCompany tags are community-reported. Counts on cards show how many people reported that design.
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4. Design a Notification System
Deliver email, push and SMS with preferences, retries and honest delivery status.
ClassicMedium5. Design a Chat System
Send durable messages, reconnect devices and explain ordering and delivery receipts.
ClassicMedium6. Design a News Feed
Build a paginated feed that handles high-fan-out authors, fresh posts and visibility changes.
ClassicMedium7. Design a File Storage Service
Upload and share large files with resumable transfer, versions and safe metadata changes.
ClassicMedium8. Design a Video Streaming Platform
Turn uploads into playable renditions and serve viewers through unreliable networks.
ClassicHard- Practice briefStart with your own approach
9. Design Search Autocomplete
Return useful prefix suggestions quickly while refreshing rankings and removing unsafe entries.
ClassicMedium 39. Design a Calendar System
Google Calendar-style events with recurrence, RSVPs and on-time reminders, using CDC for change notifications and a delay queue for reminders.
ClassicMedium44. Design a Price Tracking Service
Watch prices on 500 million products with a polite crawler and a million browsers, verify what you are told, and notify subscribers within minutes of a drop.
ClassicMedium47. Design an Online Judge like LeetCode
Run strangers' code safely in single-use microVMs, return verdicts within 5 seconds, and rank 100,000 contestants live.
ClassicMedium48. Design a Ticket Booking System like Ticketmaster
Hold seats with one conditional write, pay by authorize and capture, and put ten million fans in a fair waiting room without selling a seat twice.
ClassicMedium49. Design an Online Auction like eBay
Take bids on 10 million live auctions with one consistent highest bid, lose none, push the price to every watcher and end each auction fairly.
ClassicMedium50. Design a Ride-Sharing Service like Uber
Price a trip, match a rider to a nearby driver who has ten seconds to accept, and never give one driver two rides.
ClassicMedium51. Design a Local Delivery Service like Gopuff
Show what 10,000 small warehouses can deliver within the hour in under 100 ms, and take multi-item orders without ever selling a unit twice.
ClassicMedium52. Design a Payment System like Stripe
Charge cards through the networks exactly once: idempotency keys, a card vault, timeouts as unknowns, signed webhooks, a double-entry ledger and reconciliation. One-hour boards for junior, senior and staff, with the theory behind them.
ClassicMedium53. Design a Stock Trading App like Robinhood
Live prices to five million phones through per-symbol pub/sub, and market and limit orders over FIX that are never lost, sent twice or overspent.
ClassicMedium54. Design a Photo Sharing App like Instagram
Photos and videos for 500 million daily users: presigned multipart uploads, a processing pipeline, CloudFront and a hybrid fan-out feed.
ClassicMedium55. Design a News Aggregator like Google News
Collect from 20,000 publishers by push, polls and crawls, file each article once into feeds by region and category, and serve a billion pages a day from the edge.
ClassicMedium56. Design a Local Business Review Site like Yelp
Search 10 million businesses by place, words and category, keep every average rating exact, and keep fake reviews out.
ClassicMedium57. Design Post Search like Facebook
Search a billion posts a day by keyword, newest or most liked first, with an inverted index you build yourself.
ClassicMedium58. Design a Dating App like Tinder
Stacks of nearby people in under 300 ms, 2 billion swipes a day, and a match never missed even when both like at once.
ClassicMedium59. Design a Fitness Tracking App like Strava
Record runs and rides on the phone without signal, upload each once, show them to friends and rank athletes by week, month and year.
ClassicMedium60. Design Live Comments like Facebook Live
Live comments for millions of viewers: SSE streams, a Redis channel per video with co-located viewers, sampling and CDN snapshots for hot videos.
ClassicMedium61. Design a Collaborative Editor like Google Docs
A hundred people typing in one document, every copy converging, nothing acknowledged lost: one owner per document, an op log with snapshots, and fenced failover.
ClassicMedium62. Design a Flash Sale System
Sell 10,000 units to a million people at noon with a lottery waiting room, a Redis gate before an Aurora ledger and holds that expire.
ClassicMedium64. Design for Contention: Thousands Racing for the Same Item
Design for contention through a limited sneaker drop: row locks, conditional writes, expiring holds, fencing tokens, sagas and one writer per item.
ClassicMedium65. Design Multi-Step Processes: Sagas, Orchestration and Durable Workflows
An order checkout across payment, inventory and shipping, run as a saga.
ClassicMedium87. Design a Hotel Booking System like Airbnb
Nights as counted inventory, holds that never double-book, search that knows availability, and payments that reconcile.
ClassicMedium88. Design a Reviews and Ratings System
Dish reviews only from customers who ordered them, votes counted from a change stream, reviews ranked by the Wilson bound, payouts made exactly once.
ClassicMedium89. Design a Donations Website for a Charity Event
Ten charities, three days, $100 M: charge through a third-party processor exactly once, queue the broadcast spikes, keep live totals on sharded counters. One-hour boards for junior, senior and staff, with the theory behind them.
ClassicMedium