Code Room
System designMediumsd-g154
Subject MapsLevel Mid–Senior~40 minCommon in Distributed systems interviewsIndustries Technology, Software development

Question

Design a reverse-geocoding service that turns a raw (lat, lng) into a human-readable address and the administrative hierarchy it falls in (country, state, city, neighborhood, postal code), for 300k requests/second with p99 under 30ms. The reference data is millions of nested boundary polygons plus an address-point dataset, updated occasionally. Cover the lookup, how you make point-in-polygon fast at this QPS, and what you cache.

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.

Narrate your design
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Run or narrate your approach, then ask the coach.