Design discussion; either an LLM-agent system or a classic product system
They grade
Requirements, architecture and trade-offs; for agent systems, cost, tool design and evaluation
AI use
Nominally AI-enabled, but the assistant is often not used
Heads-up
Some loops have two design rounds.
Questions Meta asks in this round 40
Design a news feedSystem designDesign the home feed for a social network with 1B users: posts from people you follow, ranked, fresh within seconds.
Last asked May 2026
Design a notification systemSystem designA shared service other teams call to send push, email and SMS notifications: templates, user preferences, retries, deduplication and rate limits.
Last asked Sep 2026
Design Facebook MessengerSystem designOne-to-one and group messaging for a billion users: real-time delivery, offline sync, read receipts and message history on every device.
Last asked Sep 2026
Design an online game leaderboardSystem designShow the top players and each player's own rank in real time as millions of scores update.
Last asked Sep 2026
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.
Last asked Sep 2026
Design search over user posts with boolean queriesSystem designDesign search over users' status posts on a large social network. Queries combine words with AND and OR (for example cats AND (dogs OR birds)), and new posts should become…
Last asked Aug 2026
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.
Last asked Jun 2026
Design a top-K popular items systemSystem designReport the K most viewed or played items over sliding windows (last minute, hour, day) from a firehose of billions of events per day.
Last asked Jun 2026
Design an online chess gameSystem designMatch players of similar rating, play live games with clocks, handle disconnects and reconnects, and keep game history and ratings.
Last asked Jun 2026
Design InstagramSystem designUsers post photos and videos, follow each other and scroll a feed; design upload, storage, feed generation and serving media worldwide.
Last asked May 2026
Design DoorDashSystem designDesign an on-demand food delivery platform: customers browse nearby restaurants and order, restaurants accept and prepare the order, and couriers are assigned to pick it up and…
Last asked Apr 2026
Design a ticket booking systemSystem designSell seats for concerts and games where demand spikes the moment sales open: hold seats briefly, never sell one twice, and stay up under the rush.
Last asked Apr 2026
Design LeetCodeSystem designUsers solve coding problems in the browser; run their submissions safely against hidden tests, return verdicts quickly, and support live contests with leaderboards.
Last asked Apr 2026
Design live comments for live videosSystem designDesign real-time comments on live video broadcasts: viewers post comments and everyone watching the same video sees them appear within a second or two, even when a popular stream…
Last asked Apr 2026
Design a nearby points-of-interest serviceSystem designGiven a user's location, return the closest restaurants, shops and other places of interest within a radius, fast, for a read-heavy global audience.
Last asked Mar 2026
Design a price tracking serviceSystem designTrack the prices of millions of products across stores and alert users when a product they watch drops below their target price.
Last asked Mar 2026
Design an ad click aggregation systemSystem designCount ad clicks per ad and per time window from billions of events a day, accurately enough to bill advertisers, with results available within minutes.
Last asked Feb 2026
Design an online auction with live biddingSystem designDesign an auction system where users bid on items (for example items posted on a social app) and everyone watching sees the current highest bid in real time until the auction…
Last asked Feb 2026
Design YouTubeSystem designUpload videos, transcode them into many formats, and stream them worldwide with adaptive bitrate, along with views, likes and comments.
Last asked Feb 2026
Design tables and metrics for product event dataSystem designFor a product feature, define the metrics that show whether it is healthy, then design the event and summary tables that compute them: grain, keys, dimensions, and how the tables…
Possibly retired
Design a people-you-may-know friend recommendation systemSystem designDesign the "people you may know" feature of a large social network: each user sees people they are not connected to yet but probably know, and can send a friend request or dismiss…
Last asked Sep 2026
Design Instagram StoriesSystem designDesign the stories feature of a photo and video app: users post photos or short videos that their followers can view for 24 hours, after which they disappear. At the top of the…
Last asked Sep 2026
Design a distributed rate limiterSystem designDesign a rate limiter that enforces a token-bucket limit per client across a fleet of servers. Cover where the limiter sits, where the bucket state lives (a shared store, local…
Last asked Aug 2026
Design an LLM-based coding assistantAI systemDesign an AI coding assistant that helps developers inside their editor: completing code, answering questions about a codebase and making edits on request. Discuss how it gathers…
Last asked Jun 2026
Design a code review agentAI systemDesign an AI agent that reviews pull requests: it reads the diff and the surrounding code, leaves comments on bugs, risky changes and style problems, and may suggest fixes. Cover…
Last asked Mar 2026
Design post privacy and visibility controlsSystem designDesign privacy settings for posts on a social network: an author chooses who can see each post (public, friends, friends of friends, custom lists, excluding certain people), and…
Last asked Feb 2026
Design a content moderation systemSystem designScreen user posts, images and videos for policy violations with ML classifiers and human reviewers, acting within seconds on the worst content.
Last asked Feb 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 Dec 2025
Explain ACID and transaction isolation levelsSystem designExplain what each letter of ACID guarantees, then walk through the standard isolation levels (read uncommitted, read committed, repeatable read, serializable) and the anomalies…
Last asked Dec 2025
Data model for feed posts and sharesSystem designModel the data behind a social feed where people create posts and share other people's posts. Name the entities (users, posts, shares and so on), design the fact and dimension…
Last asked Dec 2025
Design a flight search serviceSystem designDesign a service where users search flights by origin, destination and dates and see prices and availability. Cover where fare data comes from and how fresh it must be, caching…
Possibly retired
Design a distributed key-value storeSystem designStore and serve billions of keys with low latency, partitioned across machines and replicated to survive failures, with tunable consistency.
Possibly retired
Design batch and streaming ETL pipelinesSystem designA data engineering onsite round on pipelines: design how product events are ingested, cleaned and aggregated into tables that analysts use, first as daily batch jobs and then as…
Possibly retired
Design DropboxSystem designSync files across a user's devices and shared folders: upload large files reliably, transfer only what changed, and handle conflicting edits.
Possibly retired
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.
Reported by 1 member · Last asked Oct 2026
Design a hotel booking systemSystem designSearch hotels by place and dates, show availability and prices, and book rooms without double-booking, including holds and cancellations.
Design a Slack-like chat systemSystem designWorkspaces, channels, threads and direct messages with real-time delivery, unread state, search and history, for large companies.
Design Google DocsSystem designMany people edit the same document at once and see each other's changes and cursors live, with offline edits and full version history.
Design SpotifySystem designStream music to hundreds of millions of listeners: catalog, search, playlists, smooth playback over bad networks, and offline downloads.
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.
Question types
Meta system design interview: questions and format · Land the Lab