Design Instagram Stories
Last updated: May 3, 2026
Quick Overview
Design the architecture for Instagram Stories. Cover scalability, data storage, caching, and real-time requirements.
Meta
System Design
Software Engineer
Meta
May 3, 2026Software Engineer
Technical Screen
System Design
Medium
11
8
4,731 solved
Design the architecture for Instagram Stories. Cover scalability, data storage, caching, and real-time requirements.
Meta asks this during the Technical Screen to assess your understanding of the full ML lifecycle. They want to see how you translate a business problem into an ML objective, design the feature pipeline, and plan for model monitoring and retraining.
What the Interviewer Expects
- Define clear ML objectives with appropriate loss functions and metrics
- Design a comprehensive feature engineering pipeline
- Discuss model selection with trade-offs (complexity vs interpretability vs latency)
- Plan online and offline evaluation strategies including A/B testing
- Address serving infrastructure: batch vs real-time, latency requirements
- Consider data quality, labeling strategy, and feedback loops
Key Topics to Cover
Training pipeline and infrastructure
A/B testing and experimentation
Model serving and latency optimization
Online vs offline evaluation
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 handle a 10x increase in prediction requests?
- How would you ensure fairness and reduce bias in the model?
- How would you run A/B tests on different model versions?
- How would you handle the cold start problem?
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Requirements
Functional Requirements
- Story Creation: Users should be able to create, edit, and delete stories that last for 24 hours.
- Story Viewing: Users can view stories in a sequential manner ...
Capacity Estimation
Assuming Meta has 1 billion active Instagram users, and approximately 500 million users post stories daily:
- Daily Story Views: If each story is viewed 10 times on average, that leads to 5 bill...
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