Meta system design interview questions
4 questions on this site are reported in Meta software engineer interviews. Each is a guided run through requirements, back-of-envelope numbers, an interactive design, user flows and deep dives with interviewer follow-ups. Patterns covered: real-time, websockets, fan-out, chat, ranking, caching, social, transcoding, cdn, adaptive-bitrate, pipelines, storage, multi-channel, idempotency, rate-limiting, priority-queues.
Attribution comes from public interview guides and candidate reports, not from Meta. It indicates where a question has been asked, nothing more.
Design Slack
Real-time team messaging: channels, DMs, presence, history and search for millions of concurrent users.
Design a News Feed
The home timeline of Twitter, Instagram or Facebook: posts from people you follow, ranked, fresh, and fast for hundreds of millions of users.
Design YouTube
Upload, transcode, and stream video to a billion viewers: a processing pipeline on one side, a CDN problem on the other.
How to prepare for a Meta system design interview
Large-company loops run 45 to 60 minutes, expect numbers, and spend most of the time on deep dives. Work each question above in practice mode until you can produce the requirements, the estimates and the flows without looking, then read the interview framework guide for how to structure the hour. The other questions on the site teach patterns that show up in Meta interviews under different names.
- Design a URL Shortenerkey-generation · caching · cdn
- Design a Payment Systemconsistency · idempotency · ledger
- Design Google Mapsgeospatial · routing · graphs
- Design a Matchmaking Systemqueues · scheduling · latency
- Design Ubergeospatial · matching · streaming
- Design a Web Crawlerfrontier · politeness · dedupe
- Design a Rate Limiteralgorithms · counters · redis