System Design - databases
#01 Data Engineering

Build Instagram Stories Expiry and Archival Pipeline Free

Design a system that automatically expires 500 million Stories after 24 hours, moves them to cold archival storage, and lets users retrieve archived Stories on demand without impacting live traffic.

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#02 Databases

Build an Inverted Index for Full-Text Search at 10B Documents Premium

Design a full-text search engine that builds and maintains an inverted index over 10 billion documents, returns results with relevance ranking in under 100ms, and updates the index in near real-time as documents are added.

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#03 Databases

Build a Multi-Tenant Database System Premium

Design a database architecture that isolates tenant data, prevents noisy-neighbor query interference, and allows individual tenants to be migrated, backed up, or throttled independently - all on shared infrastructure.

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#04 Distributed Systems

Build a Payment Processing System with Idempotency Guarantees Premium

Design a payment system that safely retries failed transactions without double-charging users, handles partial failures across payment provider integrations, and maintains a consistent ledger under concurrent requests.

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#05 Performance

Build a Personalized Typeahead Search Engine Premium

Design a search suggestion system where the same prefix returns different top results per user based on their history, while still surfacing globally trending queries and completing within 50ms end-to-end.

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#06 Databases

Build a Semantic Search Engine with Hybrid Ranking Premium

Design a search engine that combines keyword-based BM25 scoring with dense vector similarity to handle queries where exact keyword matches are absent but semantic intent is clear.

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#07 Databases

Build a Social Graph Service at 500M Users Free

Design a graph service that answers 'does user A follow user B?' in under 1ms, supports mutual friend queries, and stays consistent as billions of follow/unfollow events happen every day.

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#08 Databases

Build a Time-Series Metrics Store Premium

Design a metrics storage engine that compresses billions of data points efficiently, supports fast range queries for dashboard rendering, and retains high-resolution data for 15 days before downsampling.

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#09 Databases

Build a Vector Search Engine Premium

Design an approximate nearest neighbor search service that indexes 100 million high-dimensional embeddings, answers similarity queries in under 20ms, and supports live index updates without downtime.

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#10 Databases

Build a Wallet Ledger System at Scale Premium

Design a digital wallet system that records every credit and debit as an immutable ledger entry, enforces double-entry bookkeeping, and provides accurate balance reads under thousands of concurrent transactions per second.

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