Skewed-access cache eviction
Design the eviction and admission policy for a large in-memory object cache (hundreds of GB across nodes) with a highly skewed access pattern: a small set of objects is hot, a huge long tail is accessed once, and scans (e.g., a crawler or analytics job) periodically sweep millions of cold keys. Plain LRU performs badly here. Explain what eviction/admission policy you'd use and why, and how you keep a scan from flushing the hot set.
What a strong answer looks like
Clarify scale and constraints first. Propose a clean component breakdown, then go deep on the hard parts (data model, bottlenecks, consistency, failure modes) and name the trade-offs you are making.
Clarify5:00 left
Estimate5:00 planned
Design15:00 planned
Deep dive12:00 planned
Failure8:00 planned
Which questions mattered is sealed until you submit. Telling you now would just be handing over the edge cases.
Run or narrate your approach, then ask the coach.