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eBay System Design Interview Questions

These system design questions—by ex-MAANG engineers—tackle eBay's marketplace challenges: high-volume auctions, search, and payments that must stay fast, fault-tolerant, and secure.

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Overview

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eBay’s platform handles millions of live listings, bids, and purchases every day. This is why eBay weighs the System Design round heavily when setting your IC level — IC3 Software Engineer through IC6 Principal Engineer — which directly impacts your base, bonus, and stock. Interviewers will probe your capacity estimates, sharding choices, cache strategies, consistency guarantees, and failure plans — mirroring eBay’s obsession with buyer-seller trust and always available commerce. This adaptive roadmap meets those expectations. You’ll reinforce core distributed-systems skills (caching, sharding, consensus, rate limiting) and then tackle specific eBay System Design Interview questions like auction fan-out, inventory consistency, search-ranking freshness.

eBay’s platform handles millions of live listings, bids, and purchases every day. This is why eBay weighs the System Design roun...Show More

WHAT YOU'LL LEARN

A structured playbook for eBay’s 45–60-minute System Design interview, covering requirements clarification, ball-park sizing, trade-off analysis, and production validation.

Reusable design patterns for real-time bidding, high-read search, and inventory consistency, built on partitioned databases and layered caches.

Latency-and-integrity tactics that keep bids instant while ensuring atomic purchases and preventing double-sell scenarios.

Scale-hardening strategies to tame hot-item traffic, orchestrate geo-replicated failovers, and absorb bursts from viral listings or major promotions.

Monitoring and alerting practices distilled from e-commerce incident retrospectives, helping you detect and resolve issues early.

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

A structured playbook for eBay’s 45–60-minute System Design interview, covering requirements clarification, ball-park sizing, trade-off analysis, and production 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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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.

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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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