Free lesson · System Design Interviews

Design a URL Shortener

Hard69 min readsystem-designinterview-prepcase-study

Design a URL Shortener — a complete, interview-style design worked end-to-end across 8 steps. Work through them in order:

1. Step 1: Functional and Non-Functional Requirements
2. Step 2: Capacity Estimation
3. Step 3: Core API Design
4. Step 4: High-Level Architecture
5. Step 5: Database Design
6. Step 6: Deep Dive - Caching Strategy
7. Step 7: Deep Dive - Scaling Design
8. Step 8: Bottlenecks and Trade-offs

Back to System Design Interviews