Senior SDE Interview Questions
93 verified Senior SDE interview questions from Google, Meta, Stripe, Amazon, Lyft and more. Covers all experience levels.
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Design Instagram feed — a user follows 500 people, each posts 2-3 times daily. How do you generate and serve a personalized, ranked feed at scale?
Design a ride-sharing location tracking system. 10 million drivers update their GPS location every 5 seconds. How do you store and query nearby drivers efficiently?
Design a notification system (push/email/SMS) that sends 10 million notifications per day to users across time zones with delivery guarantees.
Design a URL shortening service (like bit.ly) that handles 1 billion shortened URLs and 100K redirects per second.
Design a distributed rate limiter that works across 100 API servers. A user is allowed 1000 requests per minute.
Design an autocomplete/typeahead system for a search engine handling 100K queries per second. Discuss the trie-based approach, how you would rank suggestions, and how you would keep the trie updated with trending queries without hurting read latency.
A news feed component re-fetches and re-renders every item whenever a single like count changes. Walk through how you would restructure state so only the affected item re-renders, without introducing a global state library.
Design the booking system for a home-rental marketplace, ensuring two guests can never double-book the same property for overlapping dates under concurrent requests.
Design the "who viewed your profile" feature for a professional network with 500M users. Discuss write amplification, retention policy, and privacy controls for who can see the data.
Design the rider-driver matching system for a ride-hailing app. How would you balance minimizing rider wait time against fairness in driver earnings distribution?
Tell me about a time your code caused a production incident. What was your immediate response, and what did you change afterward so it wouldn't happen again?
Design the video encoding pipeline that takes a raw uploaded file and produces multiple bitrate/resolution variants for adaptive streaming. How do you make this fault-tolerant and cost-efficient at scale?
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