Design a service that turns long URLs into short links, redirects on access, and reports click counts.
How to approach it
Close by naming what breaks first under load, what you would cut under time pressure, and the one sentence that captures the system’s essence. Identifying the first bottleneck and the consistency/latency tradeoffs is the strongest senior signal you can give.
What breaks first
A viral link creating a read hot spot on one cache/DB shard.
What to cut under pressure
- custom aliases
- real-time stats
Remember
It is fundamentally a read-heavy KV + cache problem; the only genuinely hard part is collision-free code generation.