System designMediumsd-g140

Subject Fleet managementLevel Mid–Senior~40 minCommon in Distributed systems interviewsIndustries Technology

Question

Design a commercial fleet-management backend tracking 500k vehicles, each reporting telematics (location, speed, fuel, engine diagnostics) every 10 seconds. The product offers a live map of all vehicles, per-vehicle history, and rules-based alerts (speeding, harsh braking, geofence breach, idle too long). Cover ingestion, the live map at scale, and rule evaluation.

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

Loading whiteboard…

Run or narrate your approach, then ask the coach.