System designHardsd-g067

Subject Search systemsLevel Senior–Staff~50 minCommon in Databases & SQL · Distributed systems interviewsIndustries Technology, Software development

Question

Design a multi-tenant full-text search platform for an e-commerce SaaS where 200k merchant stores share the cluster. Catalog sizes range from 50 products (long tail) to 8M products (a few whales). Search must return in under 100ms p95, indexing of a product edit must be visible within 5s, and one noisy whale must not degrade a small merchant's latency. Read:write is roughly 100:1.

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.

Learn the concepts

Narrate your design

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Run or narrate your approach, then ask the coach.