Design URL Shortening Infrastructure for microservices
Last updated: January 6, 2026
Quick Overview
Design a fault-tolerant url shortening system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Doordash
January 6, 20269
5
3,813 solved
Design a fault-tolerant url shortening system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Software engineering fundamentals questions at Doordash test your understanding of core CS concepts and their practical application. This Technical Screen question evaluates how you apply engineering principles to build maintainable, scalable software.
What the Interviewer Expects
- Design a complex system component applying multiple engineering principles
- Reason about system-level trade-offs: performance, reliability, developer experience
- Discuss advanced patterns: event sourcing, CQRS, distributed transactions
- Address cross-cutting concerns: observability, security, backward compatibility
- Demonstrate depth in both theoretical foundations and practical implementation
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 this design change if the team size doubled?
- How would you document this for other engineers?
- How would you handle backward compatibility?
- What testing strategy would you use for this component?
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Core Design Principles
For the URL shortening system, the key design principles to consider are Separation of Concerns and Fail-Fast. The separation of concerns allows us to modularize different functionalities, suc...
Architecture
The architecture for the URL shortening system will use a microservices approach, with independent services for URL generation, storage, and redirection. Each service will communicate via RESTful APIs...
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