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Meta System Design Interview Questions

Inspired by Meta’s “move fast” culture where engineers create and maintain systems that can scale to billions of users, these questions are everything you need to ace Meta System Design Interviews.

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Overview

Content

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Flagship Meta products like Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp must stay responsive and reliable for billions of monthly active users worldwide. As such, System Design is the backbone of day-to-day engineering work, company culture, and — because Meta only hires the best — the interview process. That’s why Meta dedicates a full onsite round to System Design (internally nicknamed “Pirate”). You’ll typically get 45 minutes to whiteboard a core service, such as Newsfeed, Messenger chat, or live video streaming. Interviewers probe your requirements gathering, back-of-the-envelope sizing, failure handling, and rollout strategy to see whether you can think and build at planet scale. This adaptive roadmap mirrors the expectations of Meta hiring managers. You’ll master the core building blocks of System Design, then tackle Meta-specific challenges like graph-centric storage, region-aware caching, hot-key mitigation, and privacy ACL enforcement.

Flagship Meta products like Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp must stay responsive and reliable for billions of monthly active u...Show More

WHAT YOU'LL LEARN

A structured playbook for Meta’s 45-minute System Design interview, covering requirement gathering, ballpark sizing, trade-off analysis, and validation.

Reusable design patterns that power features such as Newsfeed ranking and friend recommendations, including sharded data stores and layered caches.

Strategies to keep responses fast while honoring per-user privacy and data freshness across global regions.

Scale-hardening tactics to soften hot-key traffic, handle regional failovers, and surface bottlenecks before they hit millions of users.

Monitoring and alerting practices distilled from real Meta outage incidents, helping you spot and resolve issues early.

Straightforward formulas for estimating storage, bandwidth, and compute — skills interviewers expect on every System Design problem.

A structured playbook for Meta’s 45-minute System Design interview, covering requirement gathering, ballpark sizing, trade-off analysis, and validation.

Content

180 Lessons140 Quizzes

System Design Interviews

5 Lessons

Getting Ready for the System Design Interview

Key Concepts to Prepare for the System Design Interview

Resources to Prepare for a System Design Interview

The Do’s and Don’ts of the System Design Interview

Let AI Evaluate your System Design Interview Preparation

Introduction

2 Lessons

Introduction to Modern System Design

Course Structure for Modern System Design

Abstractions

4 Lessons

Non-functional System Characteristics

6 Lessons

Back-of-the-envelope Calculations

2 Lessons

Building Blocks

1 Lessons

Domain Name System

2 Lessons

Load Balancers

3 Lessons

Databases

5 Lessons

10.

Key-value Store

5 Lessons

11.

Content Delivery Network (CDN)

7 Lessons

12.

Sequencer

3 Lessons

13.

Distributed Monitoring

3 Lessons

14.

Monitor Server-side Errors

3 Lessons

15.

Monitor Client-side Errors

2 Lessons

16.

Distributed Cache

6 Lessons

Distributed Cache System

Mock Interview

Premium

17.

Distributed Messaging Queue

7 Lessons

18.

Pub-sub

3 Lessons

Pub-Sub

Mock Interview

Premium

19.

Rate Limiter

5 Lessons

20.

Blob Store

6 Lessons

Blob Store

Mock Interview

Premium

21.

Distributed Search

6 Lessons

22.

Distributed Logging

3 Lessons

23.

Distributed Task Scheduler

5 Lessons

24.

Sharded Counters

4 Lessons

25.

Concluding the Building Blocks Discussion

4 Lessons

26.

Design YouTube

6 Lessons

TikTok

Mock Interview

Premium

27.

Design Quora

5 Lessons

28.

Design Google Maps

6 Lessons

29.

Design a Proximity Service / Yelp

5 Lessons

30.

Design Uber

7 Lessons

Uber Eats

Mock Interview

Premium

31.

Design Twitter

6 Lessons

32.

Design Newsfeed System

4 Lessons

33.

Design Instagram

5 Lessons

NewsFeed

Mock Interview

Premium

34.

Design a URL Shortening Service / TinyURL

6 Lessons

35.

Design a Web Crawler

5 Lessons

36.

Design WhatsApp

6 Lessons

Facebook Messenger

Mock Interview

Premium

37.

Design Typeahead Suggestion

7 Lessons

38.

Design a Collaborative Document Editing Service / Google Docs

5 Lessons

39.

Spectacular Failures

4 Lessons

ChatGPT

Mock Interview

Premium

40.

Concluding Remarks

1 Lessons

Certificate of Completion

Showcase your accomplishment by sharing your certificate of completion.

Developed by MAANG Engineers

Every Educative lesson is designed by a team of ex-MAANG software engineers and PhD computer science educators, and developed in consultation with developers and data scientists working at Meta, Google, and more. Our mission is to get you hands-on with the necessary skills to stay ahead in a constantly changing industry. No video, no fluff. Just interactive, project-based learning with personalized feedback that adapts to your goals and experience.

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Front-end Developer

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Vinay Krishnaiah

Software Developer

Hands-on Learning Powered by AI

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Personalized Interview Prep

Skip the LeetCode grind with a custom roadmap that adapts to your goals. Hands-on practice for Coding Interviews, System Design, and more.

Mock Interviews

Test your skills in a simulated interview setting. Receive personalized feedback based on your performance. Available for Coding Interviews, System Design, and more.

AI Prompt

Build prompt engineering skills. Practice implementing AI-informed solutions.

Code Feedback

Evaluate and debug your code with the click of a button. Get real-time feedback on test cases, including time and space complexity of your solutions.

Explain with AI

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AI Code Mentor

AI Code Mentor helps you quickly identify errors in your code, learn from your mistakes, and nudge you in the right direction — just like a 1:1 tutor!

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