Snowflake System Design Questions

Design a Reliable Job Scheduler

Design a distributed job scheduler that runs user-defined jobs at a specified time (one-time) or on a recurring cron schedule, at a scale of millions of jobs per day. Requirements: jobs fire close to their scheduled time, each…

Also reported as: Design a Cron Job Scheduler

Design an Interactive Query Execution Notebook

Design a notebook-style service where users submit SQL queries against a data warehouse and see results interactively. Queries can run from milliseconds to hours. Focus on how the client learns job status and fetches results:…

Design Calendar Frontend State for Recurring Events

Design a calendar service like Google Calendar. Users create, update and delete events (one-time and recurring), invite attendees who can accept or decline, view day/week/month/agenda views across time zones, share calendars, get…

Design a Geolocation Search Service

Design a proximity search service like Yelp or Uber Eats restaurant search. Given a user's latitude/longitude, a radius, optional text query and filters (category, rating, open now), return the top K places ranked by distance and…

Design an Audit Logs Service

Design a multi-tenant audit logging service that records security-relevant actions (who did what to which resource, when, and from where) across a SaaS product. Requirements: no lost events, tamper-evident storage (hash chaining,…

Design an Automated Jira-Ticket-to-PR System

Design a system that watches Jira tickets and automatically produces pull requests: when a ticket is labeled, an AI agent checks out the repo, implements the change, runs tests, and opens a PR linked back to the ticket.…

Design a REST API Abstraction Layer

A company has many application servers that call internal REST services, and every caller hand-writes the same boilerplate: build the HTTP request, handle auth, retries, timeouts, serialization and errors. Design a reusable…

Design a disk-backed KV store under contention

Design a horizontally scalable distributed key-value store like DynamoDB or Cassandra, or scale a single-node store to a stated workload (e.g., 50M keys, 1M requests/sec, 50/50 reads and writes). Support get/put/delete with…

Design an ACL authorization checking service

Design an authorization system that supports both role-based access control (users and groups have roles such as Admin, Editor or Viewer that grant permissions) and resource-level ACLs (individual resources grant or deny specific…

Design an object store with deduplication

Design a cloud object storage service like Amazon S3 where clients upload, download and delete objects (up to many GB) organized in buckets. Requirements: very high durability (11 nines), high availability, multipart and…