Design a Rate Limiting for Optiver
Last updated: January 18, 2026
Quick Overview
Design a low-latency rate limiting system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Optiver
January 18, 2026571
14
4,128 solved
Design a low-latency rate limiting system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
This fundamentals question from Optiver's Onsite 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 document this for other engineers?
- What testing strategy would you use for this component?
- How would this design change if the team size doubled?
- How would you measure the performance of this component in production?
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Core Design Principles
For the rate limiting system at Optiver, the following core design principles apply:
- Separation of Concerns: The rate limiting logic should be decoupled from the business logic. This ensures t...
Architecture
The architectural approach for the rate limiting system will be microservices-based, leveraging a combination of API Gateway and distributed caching:
- API Gateway: This acts as the entry point ...
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