64 System Design Interview Questions, Ranked From Easiest to Hardest

If you’ve ever stared at a list of 200 system design interview questions and felt your motivation drain out through your shoes, this article is for you. Here’s the uncomfortable truth about preparing for system design interviews: most curated lists you’ll find online are useless not because the problems are bad, but because they’re presented as a flat soup. Designing TinyURL and designing a stock exchange are not the same kind of challenge. They don’t take the same amount of preparation. They don’t test the same skills. And lumping them together makes you feel like you have an impossibly long road ahead, when really the road is much shorter than it looks — you just need to walk it in the right order. So I sat down with the four most respected system design courses on the internet — the original Grokking series, its Volume II successor, the advanced case-studies course, and the newer crash course — and pulled out every single design question. I ended up with 64 of them. Then I did something nobody else seems willing to do: I ranked them from easiest to hardest, in five clean tiers. The result is a roadmap. Start at Tier 1, work your way up, stop when you hit the level your interview demands. No more drowning in a sea of equally-weighted problems. Let’s go. How to read this tier list A few ground rules before you dive in. Difficulty here means interview difficulty, not real-world difficulty. A problem like…

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