Robinhood System Design Round (Virtual Onsite)
Summary
During my virtual onsite system design interview at Robinhood, I was presented with a challenge to design a fault-tolerant order entry system specifically for limit orders.
Full Experience
I participated in a virtual onsite system design round at Robinhood. The interviewer presented me with a complex system design problem, asking me to architect an order entry system. This problem focused heavily on the intricacies of handling limit orders, ensuring concurrent request tolerance, and designing for server instance failures without data corruption. It was a comprehensive design challenge.
Interview Questions (1)
At Robinhood, we have an order entry system that accepts both buy and sell orders from our clients. These orders must be validated first before they are forwarded to a third party exchange.
For this question, we will only focus on limit order instead of market orders. Because limit orders do not receive immediate executions from the stock market, there can be an arbitrary wait. This means the orders can stay open forever.
Our system must tolerate concurrent requests and server instance failures without data corruption or 'double spending' issues.