System designHardsd-g150

Subject Fleet managementLevel Senior–Staff~45 minCommon in Storage & CDN interviewsIndustries Technology

Question

Design the trip-history and trajectory-replay storage backend for a fleet/AV platform retaining 2 years of per-second GPS for 1M vehicles (~63B points/vehicle-year). Users replay any trip on a map, scrub the timeline, and run analytics like 'time spent in zone X' or 'all trips passing through area Y'. Cover the storage layout, compression, and how spatial+temporal queries stay fast over this volume.

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.