System designHardsd-g210

Subject Multi regionLevel Senior–Staff~50 minCommon in Distributed systems interviewsIndustries Technology, Software development

Question

Design the data layer for a ride-hailing dispatch system operating in 40 cities across 6 regions. A trip's state (request → match → in-progress → complete) updates many times in seconds and must be strongly consistent within a city (no double-dispatching a driver), but global aggregates (surge, analytics) tolerate staleness. Trips never cross cities. With 200k concurrent trips at peak, how do you partition and place data so writes are fast and consistent where it matters?

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.