Build a high-throughput URL Shortening Pipeline
Last updated: February 14, 2026
Quick Overview
Design a high-throughput url shortening system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Spotify
February 14, 20262
4
4,653 solved
Design a high-throughput url shortening system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Spotify asks this during the Technical Screen to assess your depth in software engineering. They want to see understanding of design patterns, system architecture, and the trade-offs involved in different technical approaches.
What the Interviewer Expects
- Design a complex system component applying multiple engineering principles
- Reason about system-level trade-offs: performance, reliability, developer experience
- Discuss advanced patterns: event sourcing, CQRS, distributed transactions
- Address cross-cutting concerns: observability, security, backward compatibility
- Demonstrate depth in both theoretical foundations and practical implementation
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 document this for other engineers?
- How would this design change if the team size doubled?
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Core Design Principles
For the URL shortening system at Spotify, we will apply the SOLID principles extensively:
- Single Responsibility Principle (SRP): Each component, such as the URL generation service, the sto...
Architectural Approach
The architecture for the URL shortening system will adopt a microservices approach, leveraging event-driven architecture. Components will include:
- API Gateway: To handle incoming reque...
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