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Top System Design Problems and Interview Questions to Crack MAANG Companies – ForumDE
✍️ By Arun Kumar | 11/18/2025
I am structuring System Design preparation in 3 tiers:
Level 1 (Basics): URL Shortener, Rate Limiter, Pastebin
Level 2 (Intermediate): Instagram, WhatsApp, Uber, Dropbox
Level 3 (Advanced): Netflix, Facebook Feed, Amazon, Payment Gateway
Level 1 (Basics): URL Shortener, Rate Limiter, Pastebin
Level 2 (Intermediate): Instagram, WhatsApp, Uber, Dropbox
Level 3 (Advanced): Netflix, Facebook Feed, Amazon, Payment Gateway
1. Foundational System Design Problems (Start Here)
These help you learn the core building blocks: scaling, caching, load balancing, and distributed storage.
Problem Core Concepts Covered 1. Design URL Shortener (like bit.ly) Hashing, DB design, cache, unique IDs 2. Design Pastebin / Gist DB sharding, storage, expiration, APIs 3. Design Tiny File Storage (like Google Drive lite) Object storage, metadata, chunking 4. Design Rate Limiter Redis, tokens, throttling algorithms 5. Design Notification System Pub/Sub, message queues, event-driven architecture 6. Design API Rate Meter / Counter Service Sliding window, distributed counter 7. Design Online Code Editor Real-time sync, WebSockets, operational transform 8. Design Load Balancer Consistent hashing, health checks, routing
| Problem | Core Concepts Covered | |
| 1. | Design URL Shortener (like bit.ly) | Hashing, DB design, cache, unique IDs |
| 2. | Design Pastebin / Gist | DB sharding, storage, expiration, APIs |
| 3. | Design Tiny File Storage (like Google Drive lite) | Object storage, metadata, chunking |
| 4. | Design Rate Limiter | Redis, tokens, throttling algorithms |
| 5. | Design Notification System | Pub/Sub, message queues, event-driven architecture |
| 6. | Design API Rate Meter / Counter Service | Sliding window, distributed counter |
| 7. | Design Online Code Editor | Real-time sync, WebSockets, operational transform |
| 8. | Design Load Balancer | Consistent hashing, health checks, routing |
2. Intermediate-Level System Design Problems
Once you know the basics, these introduce scalability, reliability, and consistency trade-offs.
| Problem | Core Concepts Covered | |
| 9. | Design Instagram / Flickr | CDN, image storage, feed generation |
| 10. | Design Twitter (Timeline + Feed) | Fan-out, cache layers, message queues |
| 11. | Design WhatsApp / Messenger | End-to-end encryption, message queues, socket connections |
| 12. | Design YouTube / TikTok | Video streaming, chunking, CDN, metadata storage |
| 13. | Design Zoom / Google Meet | WebRTC, video encoding, low latency protocols |
| 14. | Design Dropbox / Google Drive | File deduplication, sync service, metadata indexing |
| 15. | Design Uber / Ola | Geospatial indexing, matching algorithms, event systems |
| 16. | Design Swiggy / Zomato | Real-time order tracking, delivery assignment, reliability |
| 17. | Design Logging & Monitoring Service | Data pipeline, stream processing, alerting |
| 18. | Design Email Service (like Gmail) | IMAP/SMTP, indexing, spam detection |
| 19. | Design Search Autocomplete | Trie, prefix search, caching |
| 20. | Design Notification Service (Push, Email, SMS) | Retry logic, event queues, microservices |
| 21. | Design Leaderboard / Ranking System | Redis sorted sets, consistent updates |
| 22. | Design Stock Trading Platform | Low-latency matching, transactions, audit logs |
3. Advanced / MAANG-Level System Design Problems
These are asked at Meta, Google, Amazon, Netflix, etc. — they test scalability, fault tolerance, and deep architecture understanding.
| Problem | Core Concepts Covered | |
| 23. | Design Netflix | Microservices, CDN, video encoding, recommendation system |
| 24. | Design Amazon E-commerce System | Catalog service, checkout flow, inventory management |
| 25. | Design Google Maps | Graph algorithms, geospatial data, caching |
| 26. | Design Booking.com / Airbnb | Availability search, reservation consistency, pricing engine |
| 27. | Design LinkedIn / Facebook Feed System | Event queues, fan-out, ranking algorithms |
| 28. | Design Slack / Teams Chat System | WebSocket scaling, group chat, message persistence |
| 29. | Design Ad Serving Platform (like Google Ads) | Targeting, ranking, bidding algorithms |
| 30. | Design Payment Gateway (like Stripe) | ACID vs eventual consistency, transaction safety |
| 31. | Design Amazon S3 / Google Cloud Storage | Object storage, replication, partitioning |
| 32. | Design Google Search | Crawling, indexing, ranking, caching |
| 33. | Design Distributed Cache System (like Redis) | Sharding, replication, eviction strategies |
| 34. | Design Notification Scheduler / Delayed Job Queue | Cron scheduling, idempotency, retries |
| 35. | Design Analytics Dashboard (like Google Analytics) | Data pipeline, stream aggregation, time-series DB |
| 36. | Design CDN (Content Delivery Network) | Edge servers, caching, invalidation policies |
| 37. | Design Cloud File Sync (like OneDrive) | Sync conflicts, versioning, diff storage |
| 38. | Design Multi-tenant SaaS Platform | Tenant isolation, billing, authentication |
| 39. | Design Event Streaming System (like Kafka) | Partitioning, offsets, fault tolerance |
| 40. | Design API Gateway | Authentication, throttling, routing, observability |
4. Deep-Dive Topics (Conceptual Building Blocks)
These aren’t problems per se, but foundational system design concepts that MAANG interviewers love:
| Area | Must-Learn Topics |
|---|---|
| Scalability | Load balancers, sharding, partitioning, replication |
| Caching | Write-through/write-back, cache invalidation, Redis, CDN |
| Databases | SQL vs NoSQL, indexing, CAP theorem, consistency models |
| Messaging | Kafka, RabbitMQ, SQS, event-driven systems |
| Storage | Blob vs block storage, distributed file systems |
| Networking | DNS, CDN, proxies, sockets, REST vs gRPC |
| Observability | Logging, metrics, tracing, monitoring |
| Security | OAuth 2.0, JWT, rate limiting, encryption |
| Cloud & Infra | Auto-scaling, container orchestration (K8s), load testing |
| Architecture Patterns | Microservices, event-sourcing, CQRS, hexagonal architecture |
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