Code Room
System designHardsd-g398
Subject Fleet managementLevel Senior–Staff~50 minCommon in Distributed systems interviewsIndustries Technology

Question

Design the real-time location ingestion backbone for a fleet platform tracking 5 million connected vehicles, each emitting a GPS+telemetry packet every 1 second (so ~5M writes/sec sustained). You must support (a) a live map showing any vehicle's current position with <2s staleness, (b) replaying a vehicle's exact route over the last 90 days, and (c) fleet-wide queries like 'all trucks currently inside this depot polygon'. Discuss the ingestion path, the storage split, partitioning to avoid hotspots, and the durability vs cost trade-off for 90 days of per-second history.

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.