JPMorgan System Design Questions

Design an E-Commerce Shopping Website

Design (or improve) a high-traffic e-commerce shopping website: product browsing, cart, checkout, orders and payment. A common variant gives you an existing cart system with latency problems and asks you to reduce cart latency…

Also reported as: Improve shopping cart latency and stock notifications

Design a URL shortener

Design a URL shortening service like TinyURL or bit.ly. Users submit a long URL and get a short code (optionally a custom alias and expiry); visiting the short URL redirects to the original. Assume hundreds of millions of new…

Design Secure Token Authorization and Large-File Transfer

Design a service that accepts large user uploads (files or product images, GBs in size), validates them, processes them asynchronously (virus scan, analysis, thumbnails, moderation), and makes results or approved assets available…

Explain a Project Architecture End to End

Walk through the architecture of a real project you built, end to end: the trigger, components and interfaces, data ownership and storage, deployment, failure handling and your personal contributions. Then redesign it to work at…

Optimize User-and-Region Queries on a Million-Row Table

Queries filtering by user and by region on a table with millions of rows are slow. Design an evidence-driven optimization plan: examine query plans, add appropriate (composite or covering) indexes, rewrite queries, and consider…

Design an Entitlement-Aware Agentic Portfolio Workflow

Design an agentic AI workflow that answers portfolio questions and performs actions (e.g., 'show my clients' exposure to tech stocks', 'rebalance this account') for financial advisors while enforcing entitlements: a user may only…

Design an Auditable Internal AI Chatbot

Design a ChatGPT-style conversational AI product. Users send a message and receive a streamed response from a model; conversations persist and can be resumed on any device; the service must stay highly available despite limited,…

Design a Scalable Notification System

Design a multi-channel notification service (push, email, SMS, in-app) that other services call to notify users. It must accept sudden bursts of millions of notifications with low acknowledgement latency, persist them durably,…

Design a Reliable Bank Payment System

Design a payment processing system (like Stripe's core) that handles about 10,000 transactions per second between merchants and external payment providers. Support the full lifecycle: authorization (place a hold on funds with low…

Design a cloud-based global property rental platform

Design a hotel or rental booking system like Booking.com or Airbnb. Users search listings by location and date range with filters, view availability and a price quote, book a room or property, and cancel; hosts manage listings,…

Design a course registration system

Design a university course registration system. Students browse courses and sections, register when their enrollment window opens, join waitlists when sections are full, and drop courses; prerequisites and schedule conflicts are…