System designHardsd-g151

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

Question

Design a map-tile serving system that renders and delivers map tiles to a web/mobile mapping product with 500k requests/second globally across 20 zoom levels. Map data (roads, POIs, buildings) updates as the world changes and as editors contribute edits. Cover raster vs vector tiles, the caching/CDN strategy, and how you propagate map data updates without re-rendering the world.

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.