Design a Task Scheduling for Spotify
Last updated: November 10, 2025
Quick Overview
Design a real-time task scheduling system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Spotify
November 10, 202540
12
3,084 solved
Design a real-time task scheduling system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Spotify asks this during the Technical Screen to assess your architectural thinking. They want to see how you decompose a complex problem, choose appropriate technologies, and reason about failure modes. Strong candidates proactively discuss monitoring, alerting, and operational concerns.
What the Interviewer Expects
- Drive the design discussion proactively with minimal interviewer guidance
- Perform detailed capacity estimation and use it to inform design decisions
- Design for global scale with multi-region deployment and data consistency
- Deep dive into 2-3 critical components with implementation-level detail
- Address complex trade-offs: CAP theorem, eventual consistency, conflict resolution
- Discuss operational excellence: deployment strategy, chaos engineering, SLOs/SLIs
- Propose a phased rollout plan from MVP to full-scale system
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
- How do you ensure data consistency across multiple services?
- What monitoring and alerting would you set up on day one?
- What would the deployment pipeline look like for this system?
- How would you handle a region-wide outage?
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Requirements
Functional Requirements
- Task Creation: Users can create tasks that need to be scheduled in real-time.
- Task Execution: The system should execute tasks based on priority and timing. 3....
Capacity Estimation
Assuming Spotify has around 500 million active users:
- Task Requests: If each user schedules 0.5 tasks per day, that results in 250 million tasks/day.
- Peak Load: During peak hours, assume 2...
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