Design a event-driven Task Scheduling System
Last updated: January 20, 2026
Quick Overview
Design a event-driven task scheduling system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Uber
System Design
Software Engineer
Uber
January 20, 2026Software Engineer
System Design Round
System Design
Easy
9
13
1,167 solved
Design a event-driven task scheduling system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
System design interviews at Uber 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
- Clearly define functional and non-functional requirements
- Propose a reasonable high-level architecture with core components
- Choose appropriate data storage solutions with basic justification
- Discuss basic scaling strategies (horizontal scaling, caching)
- Identify potential bottlenecks and suggest simple solutions
Key Topics to Cover
Consistency models and replication
Caching strategies (local, distributed, CDN)
High-level architecture and component design
API design and rate limiting
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
- How would you migrate from a monolithic to a microservices architecture?
- How do you ensure data consistency across multiple services?
- What happens if one of your database nodes goes down?
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Requirements
Functional Requirements
- Task Creation: Users can create tasks with specific parameters (e.g., type, priority, execution time).
- Task Scheduling: The system schedules tasks based on pr...
Capacity Estimation
Capacity Estimation
- User Base: Assume 1 million active users.
- Requests per User: On average, each user submits 5 tasks per day.
- Total Tasks Per Day: 1,000,000 users * 5 tasks = 5...
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