Design a book price aggregatorSystem designShow the current price of a book across many online sellers, keeping prices fresh while respecting each seller's API limits.
Last asked Sep 2026
Databricks system design interview
Round 7 of 8 · 26 questions reported
- Length
- 60 min
- Format
- Design discussion, often written in a Google Doc rather than on a whiteboard
- They grade
- Depth as the interviewer keeps extending the problem
- Heads-up
- Smaller and more concrete than at most big tech companies: API, schema, workflow, failure handling and a few scaling and concurrency choices.
Questions Databricks asks in this round 26
- Design a Slack-like chat systemSystem designWorkspaces, channels, threads and direct messages with real-time delivery, unread state, search and history, for large companies.Last asked Sep 2026
- Design a single-node in-memory cache with a write-ahead logSystem designDesign an in-memory key-value cache that sits inside one web service. Then make it survive restarts with a write-ahead log, and explain how you would shard it and cut lock…Last asked Sep 2026
- Design a harmful content detection systemML designDetect harmful posts (hate, violence, self-harm, spam) across text and images, with high recall on severe harms and a path to human review.Last asked Sep 2026
- Retrieve tables and notebooks for a data-aware coding agentAI systemAn internal coding agent helps employees write code and answer questions. When someone asks a data question, such as how a metric changed over some period, the agent first has to…Last asked Sep 2026
- Design a collaboratively edited playlistSystem designSeveral people add, remove and reorder songs in the same playlist at once. Scale is not the point: model the ordered list so reorders are cheap and concurrent edits resolve…Last asked Jul 2026
- Design typeahead suggestionsSystem designSuggest completions as the user types into a search box, within tens of milliseconds, ranked by popularity and fresh with trending queries.Last asked Sep 2026
- Design a payment systemSystem designAccept card payments for merchants: authorize, capture, settle with card networks, and reconcile, never charging twice or losing money.Last asked Sep 2026
- Design the metadata service of a strongly consistent distributed file systemSystem designDesign the namespace layer for a distributed file system: make directories, list them, put and get files, delete, and walk the tree recursively. A listing must reflect every write…Last asked Sep 2026
- Design retrieval for a coding agent over a code baseAI systemA coding agent is an LLM assistant that works inside a software code base: it reads code, answers questions about it and makes edits. It depends on retrieval to put the right code…Last asked Sep 2026
- Design an order relay service in front of a broker APISystem designClients send buy and sell orders with a deadline to your service, which forwards them to a third-party broker, tracks each order until it fills, and cancels whatever has not…Last asked Apr 2026
- Design a distributed job schedulerSystem designDesign a service that runs millions of scheduled and on-demand jobs (cron-like and one-off) reliably across a fleet of workers.Last asked Apr 2026
- Design CRUD APIs backed by asynchronous jobsSystem designDesign a service that exposes create, read, update and delete APIs for a resource, where some operations start long-running work that cannot finish inside the request. Cover the…Last asked Jan 2026
- Design a dependency-aware job schedulerSystem designDesign a job scheduler in which each job is a list of tasks with dependencies between them; a task may start only when every task it depends on has finished. Cover how you…Last asked Jan 2026
- Design a digital game store backendSystem designDesign the backend of an online store that sells digital games: players browse a catalog, buy games, and own them afterwards. Focus on the purchase: taking the payment, granting…Last asked Dec 2025
- Design a rate limiterSystem designDesign a service that limits how many requests each API client can make. It sits in front of every API endpoint at high traffic.Last asked Nov 2025
- Design an ad marketplace between publishers and advertisersSystem designPublishers' pages request ads and advertisers bid to fill them. Design the marketplace: bidding and matching within a tight latency budget, serving the winning ad, and tracking…Last asked Nov 2025
- Design UberSystem designRiders request trips, nearby drivers get matched, and both see live location until drop-off, with pricing and payment, for millions of trips a day.Possibly retired
- Design a distributed web crawlerSystem designCrawl billions of web pages politely and repeatedly, deduplicating URLs and content, to feed a search index or a training-data pipeline.
- Design a GPU scheduling platformAI systemShare a large GPU cluster among research and production teams: queue training and inference jobs, enforce quotas and priorities, place jobs on topology-aware hardware, and preempt…
- Design a Kafka-like distributed message queueSystem designDesign a durable, partitioned log that producers append to and many consumer groups read at their own pace, surviving broker failures without losing acknowledged messages.
- Design a RAG system over company docsAI systemEmployees should be able to ask questions about internal documents (Drive, Confluence, Slack, GitHub) and get grounded answers with citations.
- Design a stock trading platformSystem designUsers place market and limit orders; match them, update balances and positions exactly once, and stream prices in real time.
- Design a VM bandwidth rate limiterSystem designCap the network bandwidth each virtual machine in a cloud region may use, enforcing per-tenant limits across many hosts without adding latency to packets.
- Design an S3-like object storage systemSystem designStore trillions of objects of any size with eleven nines of durability, and serve reads and writes over an HTTP API at high throughput.
- Design DropboxSystem designSync files across a user's devices and shared folders: upload large files reliably, transfer only what changed, and handle conflicting edits.