Design a Rate Limiting Service
Last updated: October 14, 2025
Quick Overview
Design a event-driven rate limiting system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Morgan Stanley
October 14, 2025220
6
3,152 solved
Design a event-driven rate limiting system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Software engineering fundamentals questions at Morgan Stanley test your understanding of core CS concepts and their practical application. This System Design Round question evaluates how you apply engineering principles to build maintainable, scalable software.
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?
- What are the security implications of this design?
- How would this design change if the team size doubled?
- What testing strategy would you use for this component?
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Core Design Principles
For designing a rate limiting service, key principles include Single Responsibility Principle (SRP) and Separation of Concerns (SoC).
- SRP ensures that our rate limiter focuses solely o...
Architecture
The architecture will be an event-driven microservices design, leveraging Apache Kafka for handling incoming requests and Redis for maintaining state and counters.
- Kafka acts as an...
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