Design a event-driven Search System

Last updated: September 30, 2025

Quick Overview

Design a event-driven search system handling millions of requests. Discuss consistency, availability, and performance trade-offs.

Walmart
System Design
Software Engineer
Walmart
September 30, 2025
Software Engineer
Onsite
System Design
Medium

667

15

1,667 solved


Design a event-driven search system handling millions of requests. Discuss consistency, availability, and performance trade-offs.

How to Approach This
  1. Start by clarifying functional and non-functional requirements with the interviewer.
  2. Estimate the scale: QPS, storage, bandwidth. This drives your design decisions.
  3. Draw a high-level architecture first, then deep dive into 1-2 critical components.
  4. Discuss trade-offs explicitly (e.g., consistency vs availability, SQL vs NoSQL).
  5. Address failure scenarios, monitoring, and how the system handles 10x traffic spikes.
Practice a Similar Problem on Codemia

Solve a related problem with our interactive workspace, get AI feedback, and view detailed solutions.

Solve on Codemia
Sample Answer
Requirements
  • Functional Requirements:
    1. Search Indexing: Ability to index products in real-time as they are added or updated in the inventory.
    2. Search Query Handling: Support for full-text...
Capacity Estimation
  1. Daily Active Users: Assume Walmart has approximately 100 million daily active users.
  2. Search Queries per User: If each user performs an average of 5 searches per day, that results in: ...

Submit Your Answer
Markdown supported

Related Questions