System designMediumsd-p001

Subject ScalabilityLevel Mid–Senior~45 minCommon in Distributed systems interviewsIndustries Technology, Software development

Question

Design a URL shortener that serves billions of redirects per day with sub-10ms latency. Walk through key generation, the read and write paths, and how you keep redirects fast as the dataset grows.

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.