Design Twitter Trending Topics
Last updated: December 27, 2025
Quick Overview
Design the architecture for Twitter Trending Topics. Cover scalability, data storage, caching, and real-time requirements.
Twitter/X
System Design
Product Manager
Twitter/X
December 27, 2025Product Manager
Technical Screen
System Design
Medium
10
14
3,469 solved
Design the architecture for Twitter Trending Topics. Cover scalability, data storage, caching, and real-time requirements.
Twitter/X 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
- 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
Monitoring, logging, and alerting
Consistency models and replication
Message queues and async processing
High-level architecture and component design
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
- What would the deployment pipeline look like for this system?
- How would you optimize costs as the system scales?
- How would you implement rate limiting to protect the system?
- How would you migrate from a monolithic to a microservices architecture?
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Requirements
Functional Requirements
- Real-time Trending Topics: The system should identify and display trending topics based on user interactions such as tweets, retweets, likes, and replies.
- **User ...
Capacity Estimation
Back-of-Envelope Calculations
- User Base: Assume 400 million monthly active users (MAUs) with 200 million daily active users (DAUs).
- Interactions: Assume each user tweets, retweets, o...
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