System designHardsd-g136

Subject Location trackingLevel Senior–Staff~45 minCommon in Distributed systems interviewsIndustries Technology

Question

Design the GPS-ingestion pipeline for a fleet/consumer location platform that receives 5M location pings per second from 20M devices, each ping ~100 bytes (lat, lng, speed, heading, accuracy, timestamp). It must power both a live 'where is X right now' view (sub-second) and historical trip replay/analytics. Cover ingestion, hot vs cold storage, and how you handle out-of-order and duplicate pings.

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.