Design a LinkedIn-Style Feed System

Published 3 October 2026

System Design — LinkedIn-Style Feed System

The system design round asked me to design a user feed. The requirements included a read-heavy workload, near-real-time updates with a small amount of acceptable delay, and ranked results, although the ranking model itself was out of scope. The interviewer explored the tradeoff between generating feeds when content is published versus assembling them when users read. A major follow-up involved users with extremely large follower counts and how their posts should be treated differently from ordinary accounts.

Storage, Caching, and Consistency

We also discussed keeping inbox/feed storage bounded, handling bursts when popular users publish content, caching feeds for active versus inactive users, updating ranking information, and ensuring that users can immediately see content they just published themselves.