Architect a geo-distributed Feed Generation Engine
Last updated: August 13, 2025
Quick Overview
Design a geo-distributed feed generation system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Meta
System Design
Software Engineer
Meta
August 13, 2025Software Engineer
Onsite
System Design
Hard
4
7
851 solved
Design a geo-distributed feed generation system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
System design interviews at Meta typically last 45-60 minutes. You are expected to drive the conversation, starting from requirements gathering through to a detailed architecture. The interviewer will evaluate your ability to handle ambiguity and make practical engineering decisions.
What the Interviewer Expects
- Drive the design discussion proactively with minimal interviewer guidance
- Perform detailed capacity estimation and use it to inform design decisions
- Design for global scale with multi-region deployment and data consistency
- Deep dive into 2-3 critical components with implementation-level detail
- Address complex trade-offs: CAP theorem, eventual consistency, conflict resolution
- Discuss operational excellence: deployment strategy, chaos engineering, SLOs/SLIs
- Propose a phased rollout plan from MVP to full-scale system
Key Topics to Cover
Consistency models and replication
Partitioning and sharding strategies
Failure handling and fault tolerance
Monitoring, logging, and alerting
How to Approach This
- Start by clarifying functional and non-functional requirements with the interviewer.
- Estimate the scale: QPS, storage, bandwidth. This drives your design decisions.
- Draw a high-level architecture first, then deep dive into 1-2 critical components.
- Discuss trade-offs explicitly (e.g., consistency vs availability, SQL vs NoSQL).
- Address failure scenarios, monitoring, and how the system handles 10x traffic spikes.
Possible Follow-up Questions
- What monitoring and alerting would you set up on day one?
- What happens if one of your database nodes goes down?
- What would the deployment pipeline look like for this system?
- How would you optimize costs as the system scales?
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Requirements
Functional Requirements:
- Feed Generation: The system must generate personalized feeds for users based on their interactions (likes, shares, comments).
- Real-time Updates: Users should...
Capacity Estimation
Back-of-Envelope Calculations:
- User Base: Assume 1 billion users with a daily active user (DAU) rate of 50% (500 million).
- Requests per User: Each active user generates an average of...
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