Design URL Shortening Infrastructure for mobile apps
Last updated: November 10, 2025
Quick Overview
Design a distributed url shortening system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Jump Trading
November 10, 2025387
12
3,338 solved
Design a distributed url shortening system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
This is a common system design question asked during Onsite at Jump Trading. The interviewer expects you to demonstrate your ability to design large-scale distributed systems, make well-reasoned trade-offs, and communicate your thought process clearly. Jump Trading values engineers who can think about scalability from day one.
What the Interviewer Expects
- Drive the design discussion proactively with minimal interviewer guidance
- Perform detailed capacity estimation and use it to inform design decisions
- Design for global scale with multi-region deployment and data consistency
- Deep dive into 2-3 critical components with implementation-level detail
- Address complex trade-offs: CAP theorem, eventual consistency, conflict resolution
- Discuss operational excellence: deployment strategy, chaos engineering, SLOs/SLIs
- Propose a phased rollout plan from MVP to full-scale system
Key Topics to Cover
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 do you ensure data consistency across multiple services?
- How would you handle a region-wide outage?
- What happens if one of your database nodes goes down?
Practice a Similar Problem on Codemia
Solve a related problem with our interactive workspace, get AI feedback, and view detailed solutions.
Solve on CodemiaSample Answer
Requirements
Functional Requirements:
- Shorten URLs: Users can submit a long URL and receive a shortened version.
- Redirect: When a shortened URL is accessed, it should redirect to the original URL...
Capacity Estimation
Assuming Jump Trading expects to handle 10 million URL shortening requests per day:
- Requests per second: 10 million / 86400 seconds = ~115.74 requests/second.
- Redirects: If each shortened ...
Submit Your Answer
