System designHardsd-g153

Subject Ride hailingLevel Senior–Staff~50 minCommon in Distributed systems interviewsIndustries Technology, Software development

Question

Design the shared-ride (carpool/pool) matching service that combines multiple riders going in similar directions into one vehicle in real time: a new request must be matched to an in-progress or forming trip within seconds such that the added detour for existing riders stays under a bound and total vehicle occupancy and routing stay feasible. 10k pool requests/second in dense metros. Cover candidate generation, the matching decision, and the detour/feasibility trade-off.

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.