System design interview question
"Design the core system for a hospital: patient records, admissions, bed assignment, orders for medication and tests, and results. Clinicians use it during emergencies. It must keep working when the network is down, and a wrong record can kill someone."
designing where correctness is a safety property, not a quality metric. Most systems tolerate eventual consistency and occasional errors. Here a stale allergy list or a mis-attributed lab result causes physical harm. The discriminating signals are: refusing to silently resolve conflicts in clinical data, designing for degraded operation rather than uptime, and getting identity right.
On Practick another engineer interviews you live for 60 minutes on a question from this bank. They have the full interviewer guide beside the call: the answers to your clarifying questions, the numbers to hand out, a ladder of follow-ups and a scoring rubric. You get the model solution once the session settles. It is free: interview someone for an hour and you have earned your own.
Book a free mock interviewAll 132 system design interview questions
System design mock interviews · DSA interview questions · Free mock interview practice · Browse interviewers · Sign in