PPractick

System design interview question

Design a stock exchange / trading system

Hard · System design (HLD) · Company tags: Robinhood, Citadel, JPMorgan, Zepto, Groww

The prompt

"Design a stock exchange. Traders submit buy and sell orders; the exchange matches them and reports trades. Matching must be strictly fair — price-time priority — and latency is measured in microseconds. Millions of orders per second at the open."

What this round really tests

deterministic, ordered, ultra-low-latency processing — the one problem in this list where the correct answer is a single-threaded process, not a distributed system. Candidates trained to reach for horizontal scaling will produce a wrong answer here, and watching whether they recognize that is the main signal.

Clarifying questions worth asking

Practise questions like this with a real engineer

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 interview

Related questions

All 132 system design interview questions

System design mock interviews · DSA interview questions · Free mock interview practice · Browse interviewers · Sign in