Design Facebook News Feed
Last updated: November 19, 2025
Quick Overview
Design the architecture for Facebook News Feed. Cover scalability, data storage, caching, and real-time requirements.
Meta
November 19, 2025179
5
807 solved
Design the architecture for Facebook News Feed. Cover scalability, data storage, caching, and real-time requirements.
Software engineering fundamentals questions at Meta test your understanding of core CS concepts and their practical application. This System Design Round question evaluates how you apply engineering principles to build maintainable, scalable software.
What the Interviewer Expects
- Apply engineering principles to a realistic design scenario
- Discuss trade-offs between different approaches with concrete examples
- Demonstrate understanding of testability, maintainability, and extensibility
- Connect theoretical concepts to production engineering practices
- Discuss how the approach scales with team and codebase size
Key Topics to Cover
How to Approach This
- Apply SOLID principles. Single Responsibility makes code testable, Open/Closed makes it extensible.
- Choose data structures based on access patterns, not familiarity.
- Prefer immutable data and message passing over shared mutable state for concurrency.
- Design APIs with RESTful conventions, versioning, meaningful errors, and pagination from day one.
Possible Follow-up Questions
- How would you document this for other engineers?
- What testing strategy would you use for this component?
- How would this design change if the team size doubled?
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Core Design Principles
For designing the Facebook News Feed, we should prioritize the following core design principles:
- Separation of Concerns: Each component of the News Feed system should handle a distinct aspect,...
Architecture
The architecture for the Facebook News Feed can be structured as follows:
- Microservices Architecture: Each service (e.g., User Service, Feed Generation Service, Notification Service) can be de...
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