System designEasysd-g561

Subject Url routingLevel Entry–Mid~25 minCommon in Distributed systems interviewsIndustries Software development, IT services

Question

Design a vanity/redirect link manager for a company's marketing team — internal tool. Marketers create human-readable short paths like 'go.acme.com/spring-sale' that redirect to long campaign URLs, and they can edit where a path points later. There are at most a few hundred links and a few thousand redirects per day. Describe the data model and the redirect flow. (This is a managed-redirects tool, not a high-scale public shortener.)

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.