System design interview question
"Design a web search engine. Given a query, return the ten most relevant pages from an index of tens of billions of documents, in under 200 milliseconds. 100,000 queries per second."
the full retrieval pipeline at extreme scale — index construction and sharding, the multi-stage retrieval funnel, and ranking. It is a large question, so the first signal is whether the candidate scopes it. The distinguishing technical content is document sharding with scatter-gather, early termination, and the cheap-to-expensive ranking cascade.
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