Introduction

If you're preparing for Software Engineer, Senior Engineer, or Staff Engineer interviews at FAANG companies, there's one round that often determines the outcome:

The System Design Interview.

Unlike coding interviews, system design interviews test your ability to build scalable systems, reason through tradeoffs, and communicate architectural decisions. 

The challenge?

You never know exactly what question you'll get.

Fortunately, most FAANG companies tend to ask variations of the same system design problems.

What FAANG Interviewers Are Actually Evaluating

Before reviewing specific questions, it's important to understand the goal of a system design interview.

Interviewers aren't looking for a perfect architecture.

They're evaluating:

✅ Requirements gathering

✅ Scalability thinking

✅ Communication skills

✅ Tradeoff analysis

✅ Knowledge of distributed systems

✅ Practical engineering judgment

The best candidates explain why they make decisions rather than simply drawing boxes and arrows.

1. Design a URL Shortener (Bitly)

This is one of the most common introductory system design questions.

Functional Requirements

• Shorten URLs
• Redirect users
• Custom aliases
• Analytics

Concepts Tested

• Database design
• Read-heavy workloads
• Caching
• Scalability
• ID generation

Common Follow-Up Questions

• How do you avoid collisions?
• How do you handle billions of URLs?
• How do you track click analytics?

Mock interview: https://youtu.be/UEuK7-XRkv4

2. Design Twitter/X

A classic FAANG favorite.

Functional Requirements

• Create tweets
• Follow users
• Home feed
• Likes and retweets

Concepts Tested

• Feed generation
• Fan-out architecture
• Database partitioning
• Caching strategies
• Event-driven systems

Interview Focus

The biggest challenge is:

How do you generate timelines for millions of users efficiently?

Interviewers often want you to discuss:

• Fan-out on write
• Fan-out on read
• Hybrid approaches

3. Design Instagram

Similar to Twitter but with media-heavy workloads.

Concepts Tested

• Image storage
• Content delivery networks (CDNs)
• Feed ranking
• Metadata storage
• Scalability

Interviewers often ask:

How would you store billions of photos while maintaining low latency?

4. Design YouTube

One of the most advanced system design questions.

Functional Requirements

• Upload videos
• Stream videos
• Search videos
• Recommendations

Concepts Tested

• Video storage
• Transcoding
• Distributed processing
• CDNs
• Caching

What Interviewers Look For

Strong candidates discuss:

• Video chunking
• Asynchronous processing
• Multi-resolution storage
• Global content delivery

5. Design Netflix

A favorite for senior-level interviews.

Concepts Tested

• Content delivery
• Video streaming
• Global scalability
• Caching
• CDN architecture

Interviewers frequently ask:

How would you support millions of concurrent viewers during a major release?

Topics to discuss:

• Edge caching
• Load balancing
• Geographic distribution

6. Design Uber

A highly realistic real-world problem.

Functional Requirements

• Request rides
• Match drivers
• Track locations
• Calculate routes

Concepts Tested

• Geospatial databases
• Real-time systems
• Event streaming
• Location indexing

Common Deep Dive

Driver matching algorithms.

Interviewers want to see how you'd efficiently locate nearby drivers in real time.

7. Design WhatsApp

Messaging systems appear frequently in interviews.

Concepts Tested

• Message delivery
• Online/offline users
• Message ordering
• Reliability
• WebSockets

Key Challenges

• Billions of messages
• Low latency
• High availability

Interviewers often ask:

How do you guarantee message delivery?

8. Design Google Drive / Dropbox

A common storage system design question.

Functional Requirements

• Upload files
• Download files
• Share files
• Synchronization

Concepts Tested

• Distributed storage
• Metadata management
• File chunking
• Synchronization

Advanced Topics

• Delta synchronization
• Version control
• Conflict resolution

9. Design a News Feed

This question appears in various forms across Meta, LinkedIn, and other companies.

Concepts Tested

• Feed generation
• Ranking systems
• Caching
• Fan-out architecture

Interviewers typically ask:

How would you generate a personalized feed for hundreds of millions of users?

10. Design a Rate Limiter

A surprisingly common interview question.

Concepts Tested

• Distributed systems
• Caching
• API protection
• Scalability

Algorithms Worth Knowing

• Token Bucket
• Leaky Bucket
• Fixed Window
• Sliding Window

This question often appears in senior backend interviews.

Questions Frequently Asked by Company

Google

Common themes:

• Scalability
• Search systems
• Storage systems
• Global infrastructure

Example Questions:

• Design Google Drive
• Design YouTube
• Design Google Maps

Amazon

Common themes:

• High availability
• Distributed systems
• Tradeoffs

Example Questions:

• Design Amazon Shopping Cart
• Design Product Catalog
• Design Order Processing System

Meta

Common themes:

• Social networks
• Feed generation
• Messaging systems

Example Questions:

• Design Instagram
• Design Facebook News Feed
• Design Messenger

Netflix

Common themes:

• Streaming
• Scalability
• Content delivery

Example Questions:

• Design Netflix Streaming
• Design Recommendation Systems

Uber

Common themes:

• Real-time systems
• Geospatial data
• Matching algorithms

Example Questions:

• Design Uber
• Design Uber Eats
• Design Real-Time Tracking

Ready to Master System Design Interviews?

The questions above are just the beginning.

In The Complete System Design Course: Crack Senior & FAANG Interviews, you'll learn:

   ✔️ The core concepts of system design & distributed systems 

   ✔️ Databases, sharding & replication 

   ✔️ The core components of any system

   ✔️ Latest technologies used in system design

   ✔️ How to structure your system design interview answer and how to communicate efficiently

   ✔️ Real-world system design mock interviews

Enroll today and start preparing like the engineers who land offers at top tech companies (launch discount available for limited time): Course Link