What are the most common system design interview questions at FAANG companies?

6. Design a Highly Available and Reliable System

• Example: "Design an e-commerce platform like Amazon."
  • Explores considerations for building resilient systems that support transactions, product listings, user reviews, and payment processing.

7. Design a Location-Based Service

• Example: "Design a service like Uber or a geo-distributed leaderboard for games."
  • Tests strategies for geospatial indexing, proximity searches, and ensuring low latency for location-based queries.

8. Design a Scalable Data Processing System

• Example: "How would you design a system to process and analyze big data in real-time?"
  • Assesses understanding of data processing frameworks, batch vs. stream processing, and data storage options.

9. Design a Rate Limiter

• Example: "Design a rate limiter for a web API."
  • Evaluates ability to implement throttling to protect resources from being overwhelmed by too many requests.

10. Design a Social Graph or Friend Recommendation System

• Example: "How would you design a system to manage friend connections or recommend friends?"
  • Involves understanding graph data structures, efficient query operations, and algorithms for recommendation systems.

Preparing for System Design Interviews

• Study Common Architectures: Learn the basic architectures of common web services and platforms.
• Understand Scalability and Reliability Principles: Be familiar with concepts such as load balancing, caching, data sharding, replication, and fault tolerance.
• Practice Communication: Clearly articulate your design decisions, trade-offs, and thought process during the interview.
• Review Case Studies: Study existing systems and understand why they were designed in a particular way.

These questions require not only technical knowledge but also creativity and a deep understanding of trade-offs in system design. Preparing for these interviews involves studying widely used systems, practicing design exercises, and reviewing real-world case studies to understand different approaches to common problems.