Design a URL Shortening for Grubhub
Last updated: April 18, 2026
Quick Overview
Design a high-throughput url shortening system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Grubhub
System Design
Software Engineer
Grubhub
April 18, 2026Software Engineer
Onsite
System Design
Medium
129
12
1,851 solved
Design a high-throughput url shortening 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
Requirements gathering and capacity estimation
Monitoring, logging, and alerting
Load balancing and horizontal scaling
High-level architecture and component design
Database selection and data modeling
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 implement rate limiting to protect the system?
- How do you ensure data consistency across multiple services?
- How would you handle a 10x increase in traffic overnight?
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Requirements
Functional Requirements:
- URL Shortening: Generate a unique short URL for any given long URL.
- Redirection: Redirect users from the short URL to the original long URL.
- Analytics...
Capacity Estimation
Back-of-Envelope Calculations:
- Daily Requests: Assume Grubhub handles approximately 10 million requests per day for URL shortening.
- QPS (Queries per Second):
- 10 million request...
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