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System Design at Google

Blog

System Design at Google

Google is known for asking some of the most challenging system design questions in the industry, covering distributed systems, data infrastructure, and large-scale web services. Their interviews emphasise designing systems that handle billions of users and petabytes of data.

21 guides availableInterview focus: Distributed systems, search infrastructure, real-time data processing, and global-scale services.

Google System Design Interview Guides

May 5, 202615 min
senior
Complete Android System Design Interview Framework
Master Android system design interviews with this repeatable framework. Learn to clarify requirements, design layered architectures, and handle offline-first da...
Dec 25, 202522 min
hard
How to Architect a Metrics Monitoring and Alerting System - Complete System Design Guide
Master metrics monitoring and alerting system design for your next big tech interview. Covers time-series data modelling, pull vs push ingestion, TSDB internals...
Dec 23, 202520 min
medium
How to Design a Distributed ID Generator - Complete System Design Guide
Master distributed ID generator system design for your next big tech interview. Covers why auto-increment fails at scale, UUID trade-offs, Snowflake's 64-bit st...
Dec 22, 202522 min
hard
How to Design a Distributed Task Scheduler - Complete System Design Guide
Master distributed task scheduler system design for your next big tech interview. Covers task submission guarantees, push vs pull worker models, leader election...
Dec 20, 202522 min
hard
How to Design a Real-Time Collaborative Editor like Google Docs - System Design Guide
Master collaborative editor system design for your next big tech interview. Covers Operational Transformation vs CRDTs with the math explained, WebSocket archit...
Dec 18, 202520 min
hard
Android System Design: Design Reddit
A complete Android system design guide for designing Reddit — focused on what real interviews actually ask. Covers architecture, infinite feed with Paging 3 and...
Dec 15, 202522 min
hard
Android System Design: Design a Trading App like Coinbase
A complete Android system design guide for designing a crypto trading app like Coinbase or Bitvavo. Covers Clean Architecture for financial apps, WebSocket chan...
Dec 12, 202520 min
medium
Android System Design: Design a Notes App
A complete Android system design guide for designing a notes app like Google Keep or Apple Notes. Covers offline-first architecture with Room, sync conflict res...
Dec 10, 202520 min
medium
How to Design an Online Book Review System - Complete System Design Guide
Master online book review system design for your next big tech interview. Covers database schema, denormalised rating counters, Bayesian average ratings, Elasti...
Dec 8, 202518 min
medium
How to Design a Pastebin Service - Complete System Design Guide
Master Pastebin system design for your next big tech interview. Covers unique key generation approaches and their trade-offs, content storage in object storage ...
Dec 1, 202522 min
hard
How to Design an E-Commerce Website - Complete System Design Guide
Master e-commerce system design for your next big tech interview. Covers microservices architecture, product catalog with Elasticsearch, Redis shopping cart, in...
Nov 28, 202522 min
hard
How to Design a Real-Time Messaging System - Complete System Design Guide
Master real-time messaging system design for your next big tech interview. Covers WebSocket connection management, cross-server message routing with Redis Pub/S...
Nov 25, 202520 min
hard
How to Design a Content Delivery Network (CDN) - Complete System Design Guide
Master CDN system design for your next big tech interview. Covers Anycast vs DNS-based routing, PoP architecture, multi-tier cache hierarchy, push vs pull CDNs,...
Nov 20, 202520 min
hard
Android System Design: Design a Photo Sharing App
A complete Android system design guide for designing a photo sharing app like Instagram. Covers Clean Architecture, image loading with Glide vs Coil, multi-laye...
Nov 18, 202522 min
hard
Android System Design: Design Uber's Mobile App
A complete Android system design guide for designing Uber's mobile app — written in a conversational interview style. Covers Clean Architecture, real-time locat...
Nov 15, 202520 min
hard
How to Design a Distributed Metrics, Logging and Aggregation System
Master distributed metrics and logging system design for your next big tech interview. Covers push vs pull collection, Kafka ingestion pipeline, time-series dat...
Nov 10, 202518 min
medium
How to Design Google Calendar - Complete System Design Guide
Master Google Calendar system design for your next big tech interview. Learn database schema design, the right way to handle timezones, how recurring events act...
Nov 4, 202522 min
hard
Android System Design: Design a Notification Library
A complete Android system design guide for designing a notification library. Covers library API design, FCM push pipeline, BroadcastReceiver, Android Notificati...
Oct 20, 202522 min
hard
How to Design Instagram / a Social Feed - Complete System Design Guide
Master Instagram and social feed system design for your next big tech interview. Learn the hybrid fan-out approach, how Instagram's real tech stack works, feed ...
Oct 10, 202520 min
hard
How to Design a Chat System (Real-Time Messaging) - Complete System Design Guide
Master chat system design for your next big tech interview. Learn WebSockets, message delivery guarantees, Cassandra schema design, fan-out for group chats, pre...
Oct 1, 202518 min
medium
How to Design a Rate Limiter - Complete System Design Guide
Master rate limiter system design for your next big tech interview. Learn every algorithm — token bucket, sliding window, leaky bucket — plus Redis-backed distr...

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