Reported interview periodJan 2026
Design a URL Shortening Service
Design a service that creates durable short links and resolves them with low latency under a read-heavy workload.
Practice focusRequirements - Define create, resolve, custom-alias, delete, and analytics APIs. - Generate compact identifiers with low collision risk and no single hot coordinator at target scale. - Preserve custom-alias uniqueness under concurrent requests. - Support expiry, abuse prevention, and safe-link checks. - Cache popular redirects without serving deleted or changed mappings indefinitely. - State traffic, data-retention, latency, and availability assumptions.…