Design a scalable Search System
Last updated: January 14, 2026
Quick Overview
Design a scalable search system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Grubhub
January 14, 2026180
8
3,770 solved
Design a scalable search system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
System design interviews at Grubhub 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
- Systematically gather requirements and estimate capacity (QPS, storage, bandwidth)
- Design a scalable architecture with clear component responsibilities
- Make well-reasoned database and caching decisions with trade-off analysis
- Address consistency vs availability trade-offs specific to the use case
- Discuss partitioning strategy, replication, and data modeling
- Cover failure handling, monitoring, and alerting strategies
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
- What would the deployment pipeline look like for this system?
- How would you handle schema migrations with zero downtime?
- What monitoring and alerting would you set up on day one?
- How would you migrate from a monolithic to a microservices architecture?
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Requirements
Functional Requirements
- Search Functionality: Users should be able to search for restaurants, cuisines, or specific dishes based on keywords.
- Autocomplete Suggestions: As users type ...
Capacity Estimation
Assuming Grubhub serves around 10 million users, with an average of 10 searches per user per day:
- Daily Searches: 10,000,000 users * 10 searches/user = 100,000,000 searches/day
- **QPS Calculat...
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