YOUR BRIEF
What to work through
Work through yelp as a spoken system design interview. Start by clarifying the scope, sketch a working design and explain the trade-offs behind your choices.
- Find businesses within a chosen radius of the user: 0.5, 1, 2, 5 or 20 km
- View a business’s details
- Business owners add, update and remove a business; changes show the next day
BEFORE YOU START
Constraints to discuss
- About 5,000 searches a second
- Low latency search (Hello Interview: under 500 ms)
- Highly available; eventual consistency is fine
- Location data is private and handled within the law
Need a starting point?
Watch for these common gaps as you prepare:
- Separate indexes on latitude and longitude and expecting a fast radius query
- Searching only the user’s own cell and missing businesses across the edge
- Sharding a 1.7 GB index that fits on one server
- Caching by raw coordinates
Why this question is in the collection
These sources connect the problem to company interview reports or preparation guides. They do not guarantee what a company will ask you.