System designMediumsd-g572

Subject System designLevel Mid–Senior~40 minCommon in ML systems · Databases & SQL interviewsIndustries Software development, Technology

Question

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.

Learn the concepts

Narrate your design

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Run or narrate your approach, then ask the coach.