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 Jun 2026
Snowflake system design interview
Round 4 of 5 · 18 questions reported
- Length
- 60 min
- Format
- Design discussion
- Heads-up
- Common prompts: a key-value store, a job scheduler, an access-control service.
Questions Snowflake asks in this round 18
- 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 Oct 2026
- Components of an LLM agent's memoryML designName the common components of an LLM agent's memory (for example the context window, a short-term scratchpad or conversation buffer, long-term stores of facts and past episodes…Last asked Sep 2026
- Design a pipeline that distills reusable agent skillsAI systemEnterprise customers run AI agents on their own tasks. Design a pipeline that automatically extracts reusable skills from that usage: a skill is a named package of instructions…Last asked Sep 2026
- Count and map a cluster tree with message passingCodingA cluster of n machines is wired as a rooted tree (any number of children per node). Each machine knows only three things: its own id (a string such as "4"), its parent's id ("-1"…Last asked Jun 2026
- Design a disk-backed key-value store under heavy contentionSystem designDesign a key-value store that keeps its data on disk and serves many concurrent readers and writers, some of them hammering the same keys. Cover the on-disk layout, the write path…Last asked Mar 2026
- Design a quota serviceSystem designTrack and enforce how much of each resource (API calls, storage, compute) every tenant may use, with fast checks and limits that stay accurate across regions.Last asked Feb 2026
- Design an access management systemSystem designDecide who can do what to which resource across many services: roles, groups, fine-grained permissions, fast checks on every request, and auditable changes.Last asked Jan 2026
- 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.Last asked Dec 2025
- Design a metrics monitoring systemSystem designCollect metrics from every host and service, store them as time series, power dashboards over months of data, and alert when thresholds are crossed.Last asked Dec 2025
- Design a cache for query views that depend on each otherSystem designIn a data warehouse, views are defined on top of tables and other views, so the views form a DAG. Design a cache that speeds up queries over these views and keeps it correct when…Possibly retired
- Design reliable sign-in on top of a flaky token providerSystem designClients get a token from a third-party auth server and present it to your main server. The third-party server is unreliable: requests fail sometimes, and sometimes it answers with…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.
- Design a logging serviceSystem designIngest logs from every service at terabytes per day, make them searchable within seconds, and keep them cheaply for months.
- Design a news feedSystem designDesign the home feed for a social network with 1B users: posts from people you follow, ranked, fresh within seconds.
- 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.
- 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 LeetCodeSystem designUsers solve coding problems in the browser; run their submissions safely against hidden tests, return verdicts quickly, and support live contests with leaderboards.