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System design interview question

Design Grammarly (text checking)

Hard · System design (HLD)

The prompt

"Design a writing assistant that checks text as the user types — grammar, spelling, clarity, tone. It runs inside other people's applications: email clients, documents, web forms. Suggestions should appear essentially instantly, and the text people write includes their most private correspondence."

What this round really tests

incremental processing plus a genuine privacy architecture. The system sees everything the user writes, including messages they would never send to a third party. Strong candidates design so that most text never leaves the device, and handle the fact that re-analysing the whole document on every keystroke is not affordable.

Clarifying questions worth asking

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