YOUR BRIEF
What to work through
Work through ticketmaster as a spoken system design interview. Start by clarifying the scope, sketch a working design and explain the trade-offs behind your choices.
- View an event and its seat map
- Search for events
- Book tickets for chosen seats
BEFORE YOU START
Constraints to discuss
- No seat is ever sold twice: consistency for booking
- Availability for browsing and search
- About 10 million users on one popular event
- Search answers in under 500 ms
- Reads outnumber bookings about 100 to 1
Need a starting point?
Watch for these common gaps as you prepare:
- Holding a database lock for the whole checkout
- A plain Redis set with no TTL, which leaves holds behind when users leave
- LIKE queries for search
- Ignoring webhook idempotency and a hold expiring during payment
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.
- Meta: Hello Interview’s Meta guides put "Design a Ticket Booking System" on the most-asked lists at E4, E5 and E6, on both tracks at E5. A Blind commenter tagged Meta calls Ticketmaster a favourite question.
- Google: Fifth on Hello Interview’s list of the system design questions most asked at Google L5.
- Amazon: Fourth on Hello Interview’s list of the system design questions most asked at Amazon SDE III.