Design a large-scale Search Platform
Last updated: November 3, 2025
Quick Overview
Design a geo-distributed search system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Doordash
November 3, 20251
4
3,840 solved
Design a geo-distributed search system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Doordash asks this during the Onsite to assess your architectural thinking. They want to see how you decompose a complex problem, choose appropriate technologies, and reason about failure modes. Strong candidates proactively discuss monitoring, alerting, and operational concerns.
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
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 handle schema migrations with zero downtime?
- What monitoring and alerting would you set up on day one?
- How would you optimize costs as the system scales?
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Requirements
Functional Requirements
- Search Functionality: Users should be able to search for restaurants and food items based on various filters (cuisine, ratings, distance).
- *Geo-Location Support...
Capacity Estimation
To estimate the capacity for our search platform, we start with the following assumptions:
- Daily Active Users: Assume 2 million users.
- Search Requests per User: Each user performs an avera...
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