Code Room
System designHardsd-g070
Subject News feedLevel Senior–Staff~50 minCommon in Distributed systems interviewsIndustries Technology, Software development

Question

Design the home timeline for a professional-networking feed with 1B users. Most users follow 200-500 connections, but some accounts (companies, influencers) have 20M+ followers. The timeline must be chronological-ish with a relevance re-rank, support sub-300ms load, and reflect a new post within ~30s for active followers.

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.

Narrate your design
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Run or narrate your approach, then ask the coach.