Design a Ride Matching Service
Last updated: May 7, 2026
Quick Overview
Design a high-throughput ride matching system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Adobe
System Design
Machine Learning Engineer
Adobe
May 7, 2026Machine Learning Engineer
System Design Round
System Design
Easy
9
12
1,046 solved
Design a high-throughput ride matching system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
System design interviews at Adobe 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
Requirements gathering and capacity estimation
Partitioning and sharding strategies
High-level architecture and component design
API design and rate limiting
Message queues and async processing
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 a 10x increase in traffic overnight?
- How do you ensure data consistency across multiple services?
- How would you optimize costs as the system scales?
- How would you handle schema migrations with zero downtime?
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Requirements
Functional Requirements:
- User Registration and Authentication: Users should be able to create accounts, log in, and log out.
- Ride Request: Users can request a ride by specifying pick...
Capacity Estimation
Back-of-Envelope Calculations:
- User Base: Assume 10 million active users.
- Requests per User: Assume each user makes 2 ride requests per day.
- Total Requests: 10 million users * 2 ...
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