Waymo system design interview

Round 4 of 6 · 9 questions reported

See the whole loop

Length: 45 min
Format: Design discussion
Heads-up: Prompts increasingly come from the interviewer's own team (fleet data collection, maps, simulation) rather than generic web scale.

Questions Waymo asks in this round 9

Design a global caching service for small imagesSystem designDesign a global caching service for small images, backed by a single database that holds every image and is the source of truth. Cover the read path, the update path, the cache…
Last asked Sep 2026
Design a matchmaking service for an online gameSystem designDesign a matchmaking service. It must let players join the queue and cancel, match two compatible players, notify both when a match is found, and deal with disconnects and…
Last asked Sep 2026
Design an AI chatbot appAI systemBuild a chatbot app on top of a hosted LLM API: conversations, streamed answers, history, and per-user usage limits.
Last asked Sep 2026
Design a fleet system that collects mapping dataSystem designDesign the system behind a fleet of sensor-equipped vehicles whose job is to collect data for building and refreshing maps. Cover how mapping needs (new areas, stale areas) become…
Last asked Jun 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 Sep 2026
Design simulation infrastructure to evaluate a self-driving model on limited computeSystem designStart from an open question: how would you evaluate a self-driving model? Then design the infrastructure: running thousands of simulations when there is not enough compute…
Last asked Sep 2026
Design reliable command delivery between autonomous vehicles and the cloudSystem designDesign how commands are sent between the cloud and a fleet of autonomous vehicles (and acknowledgements back), so a command is delivered and acted on exactly as intended even with…
Last asked Aug 2026
Design a shared-ride matching serviceSystem designDesign the service that matches riders into shared rides and runs those trips: taking requests, deciding which riders share a vehicle, planning pickups and drop-offs along the…
Last asked Aug 2026
Design an elevator control systemOO designModel a bank of elevators: hall and car requests, a dispatching strategy, direction and door states, and capacity limits.
Last asked Apr 2026