Design a Top-K Leaderboard
Last updated: June 17, 2026
Quick Overview
Design a real-time leaderboard system that shows top-K users by score. Cover efficient ranking data structures, handling frequent score updates, and scaling to millions of users with sub-second query latency.
Meta
System Design
Software Engineer
Meta
June 17, 2026Software Engineer
System Design Round
System Design
Medium
60
0
227 solved
Design a real-time leaderboard system that shows top-K users by score. Cover efficient ranking data structures, handling frequent score updates, and scaling to millions of users with sub-second query latency.
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.
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