Over the last five years, 95% of the System Design interviews our founding team (ex-Meta, ex-Google, and ex-OpenAI) has taken have revolved around a surprisingly small set of practical, repeatable problems.
If you’re preparing for FAANG+ interviews (or just want to learn System Design the right way), this is the must-solve list. Mastering these problems will not only prepare you for interviews but also give you a deep understanding of how real-world systems are built.
We’ve grouped them into themes that mirror the most common categories interviewers care about.
1. Building Social Experiences at Scale
Designing feeds, messaging, notifications, and social graphs.
- Design Twitter Feed
- Design Instagram Feed
- Design WhatsApp Messaging
- Design Facebook Messenger
- Design Twitter Direct Messages
- Design Instagram Stories
- Design Instagram Ads
- Design Twitter Notifications
- Design Tinder
- Design Reddit
- Design Facebook News Feed
- Design LinkedIn Connections
- Design Notification Service
- Design Facebook Messenger Payments
Systems that deliver real-time content, recommendations, and entertainment.
- Design Spotify Playlist
- Design Netflix Playlist
- Design Netflix Recommendations
- Design YouTube Streaming
- Design Spotify Connect
- Design Spotify Discover Weekly
- Design Instagram Reels
- Design TikTok Feed
- Design YouTube
- Design Amazon Recommendations
3. Commerce, Logistics & Transactions
Designing scalable systems for shopping, payments, and marketplaces.
- Design Amazon Shopping Cart
- Design Amazon E-commerce Store
- Design Shopify Store
- Design Flight Booking System
- Design Stock Exchange System
- Design Payment System
- Design Uber Eats
- Design Uber Dispatch System
- Design Food Delivery App
- Design Uber Pool
- Design Uber Freight
- Design Booking System (BookMyShow)
4. Collaboration & Cloud Productivity
File storage, real-time collaboration, and distributed editing platforms.
- Design Google Drive
- Design Google Docs
- Design Dropbox File Sharing
- Design Distributed Cloud Storage (S3)
- Design Online Code Editor
- Design Code Deployment System
- Design File Sharing System
- Design Distributed Web Crawler
5. Core Infrastructure & Distributed Systems
The backbone: queues, databases, storage, and analytics engines.
- Design Distributed Message Queue (Kafka)
- Design Amazon SQS
- Design Distributed Locking Service
- Design Amazon EC2
- Design Amazon DynamoDB
- Design Amazon Redshift
- Design AWS S3
- Design Google Analytics
- Design Analytics Platform (Metrics & Logging)
6. Search, Ranking & Discovery Engines
How information is indexed, ranked, and surfaced at scale.
- Design Google Search
- Design Twitter Search
- Design Autocomplete for Search Engines
- Design Recommendation System
- Design Rate Limiter
7. Real-Time Maps & Scheduling Systems
Geospatial and temporal challenges: routing, timing, and planning.
- Design Uber ETA Calculation
- Design Google Maps
- Design Location-Based Services (Yelp)
- Design Calendar System (Google Calendar)
- Design Scheduling Platform
8. Universal Design Patterns
Cross-cutting systems that appear in nearly every domain.
- Design Notification Service
- Design Metrics Platform
- Design Stock Exchange System
- Design Real-Time Collaboration (Google Docs)
- Design Chat Application
- Design Personalization Engine
- Design Video Conferencing (Zoom)
If you’re serious about cracking FAANG+ interviews, don’t waste time solving random problems. Focus on these repeatable, high-frequency patterns. Not only will you feel more confident in interviews, but you’ll also build the kind of system-level intuition that top companies expect from their engineers.
Start with one theme, master the trade-offs (scalability, latency, fault tolerance, storage, cost), and then expand. With this list, you’ll be practicing the real-world problems that matter most.
