System designMediumsd-g139

Subject Nearby searchLevel Mid–Senior~40 minCommon in ML systems interviewsIndustries Technology

Question

Design the 'restaurants near me' backend for a local-discovery app with 50M points of interest worldwide and 100M searches/day. A search takes a location + radius + optional filters (cuisine, open-now, rating) and returns ranked results in under 200ms. POIs are mostly static but ratings/hours change. Cover the spatial index, filtering, and ranking.

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.