System designHardsd-p002

Subject Api designLevel Senior–Staff~45 minCommon in Networking & APIs interviewsIndustries Technology, Software development

Question

Design a distributed rate limiter for an API gateway handling ~1M requests/sec across 50 edge locations, enforcing per-tenant per-endpoint quotas. How do you keep limits accurate without a global bottleneck?

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.