Code Room
System designEasysd-g544
Subject Polling feedLevel Entry–Mid~25 minCommon in Networking & APIs · Distributed systems interviewsIndustries Software development, Technology

Question

Design the backend for a simple announcements feed inside a company app: an admin posts announcements, and all employees see them newest-first with infinite scroll. There are a few hundred announcements total and a few thousand employees who open the feed throughout the day. It is extremely read-heavy with rare writes. Cover the data model, how the feed is paged, and how you serve the heavy read traffic cheaply.

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.