System design interview question · Backend

Design an API rate limiter

Protect a public API without slowing down well-behaved clients.

Intermediate 40 minutesReliability Plus
More Backend questions

Concepts this round covers

  • Token bucket
  • Distributed counters
  • Fail-open or closed
  • Reliability

This is a Plus round

The brief, the scale to design for, the questions interviewers ask and the common mistakes for this round are available to Plus members. Plus is coming soon.