System designHardsd-g674

Subject Geo partitioned databaseLevel Senior–Staff~50 minCommon in Databases & SQL · Distributed systems interviewsIndustries Technology, Software development

Question

Design a geo-partitioned database for a ride-hailing platform where most reads and writes for a trip stay within one city, but cross-city operations (a rider traveling, fleet analytics) exist. Scale is 500k active trips, 40k writes/sec concentrated in dense metros, with a 50ms in-region write SLA. Some metros are far hotter than others. How do you partition data by geography, place leaders, and handle a metro that suddenly doubles in traffic?

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.