Architect a multi-tenant URL Shortening Engine
Last updated: July 20, 2025
Quick Overview
Design a multi-tenant url shortening system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Figma
July 20, 202530
13
3,548 solved
Design a multi-tenant url shortening system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
This fundamentals question from Figma's System Design Round tests whether you can reason about software design at a deep level. The interviewer expects discussion of maintainability, testability, and operational considerations.
What the Interviewer Expects
- Apply engineering principles to a realistic design scenario
- Discuss trade-offs between different approaches with concrete examples
- Demonstrate understanding of testability, maintainability, and extensibility
- Connect theoretical concepts to production engineering practices
- Discuss how the approach scales with team and codebase size
Key Topics to Cover
How to Approach This
- Apply SOLID principles. Single Responsibility makes code testable, Open/Closed makes it extensible.
- Choose data structures based on access patterns, not familiarity.
- Prefer immutable data and message passing over shared mutable state for concurrency.
- Design APIs with RESTful conventions, versioning, meaningful errors, and pagination from day one.
Possible Follow-up Questions
- How would you handle backward compatibility?
- How would you measure the performance of this component in production?
- How would you document this for other engineers?
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Core Design Principles
For the multi-tenant URL shortening system, the core design principles include Separation of Concerns, Scalability, and Simplicity.
- Separation of Concerns: By isolating functional...
Architecture
The architecture for the URL shortening system will follow a microservices approach, utilizing AWS services and a combination of technologies:
- API Gateway: To handle incoming requests and route...
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