Full-text search for docs
Design a small full-text search feature for a help-center / docs site with ~500K documents (articles, FAQs), ~50 QPS of search traffic, and a few thousand content edits per day. Requirements: typo tolerance and prefix/autocomplete, relevance ranking (title matches beat body matches, recency a tiebreaker), filter by category/product, results in <100ms p95, and edits should appear in search within a minute. The team is small — minimize operational complexity.
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.
Clarify4:30 left
Estimate4:30 planned
Design13:30 planned
Deep dive10:30 planned
Failure7:00 planned
Which questions mattered is sealed until you submit. Telling you now would just be handing over the edge cases.
Run or narrate your approach, then ask the coach.