Code Room
System designHardsd-g133
Subject Ride hailingLevel Senior–Staff~45 minCommon in Databases & SQL interviewsIndustries Technology

Question

Design the rider-to-driver matching service for a ride-hailing platform operating in 200 cities, peaking at 30k ride requests/second globally with ~3M drivers broadcasting GPS updates every 4 seconds. A request must return up to 10 candidate drivers within ~2km in under 150ms p99, and a driver must never be offered to two riders at once. Walk through the geo-index, the dispatch loop, and how you keep consistency under concurrent matches.

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.