Design a real-time URL Shortening System
Last updated: April 15, 2026
Quick Overview
Design a real-time url shortening system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Splunk
April 15, 202610
7
1,561 solved
Design a real-time url shortening system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Software engineering fundamentals questions at Splunk test your understanding of core CS concepts and their practical application. This Technical Screen question evaluates how you apply engineering principles to build maintainable, scalable software.
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 this design change if the team size doubled?
- How would you handle backward compatibility?
- What are the security implications of this design?
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Core Design Principles
In designing a real-time URL shortening system, we will apply the following core design principles:
- Single Responsibility Principle (SRP): Each component of the system should have a single res...
Architecture
The architecture for the URL shortening system will be a microservices-based approach:
- API Gateway: An API Gateway will handle incoming requests, providing a single entry point and acting as a...
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