Design LinkedIn
What is LinkedIn?
LinkedIn is a professional networking platform that allows individuals to create and maintain an online career profile, connect with other professionals, apply for jobs, and share industry-related content.
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It also serves as a recruiting and branding platform for companies to post job openings, build their presence, and hire qualified candidates.
In this chapter, we will explore the low-level design of LinkedIn like system in detail.
Let's start by clarifying the requirements:
1. Clarifying Requirements
Before starting the design, it's important to ask thoughtful questions to uncover hidden assumptions and better define the scope of the system.
Here is an example of how a conversation between the candidate and the interviewer might unfold:
Candidate: Should the system allow users to create detailed professional profiles?
Interviewer: Yes, members should be able to add a summary, work experience, and educational background.
Candidate: Should members be able to connect with each other?
Interviewer: Yes, the system should allow one member to send a connection request to another. The receiver can accept or reject it.
Candidate: Can members post updates, and should these be shown in a personalized feed?
Interviewer: Yes, members can create posts. A member should see posts from their connections in their news feed.
Candidate: Should members be able to like or comment on a post?
Interviewer: Yes, and the post’s author should be notified of these interactions.
Candidate: Do we support any search functionality?
Interviewer: Yes. Members should be able to search for other members by name (case-insensitive substring match is enough for now).
Candidate: Should the system include messaging, endorsements, job applications, or premium features?
Interviewer: No, let’s keep it simple. Focus only on core features: profiles, connections, posting, feed, notifications, and search.
After gathering the details, we can summarize the key system requirements.
- Profile Management: Allow members to create and update their professional profiles
- Connection Management: Members can send connection requests to other members. Requests can be accepted or rejected.
- Posting: Members can create text-based posts.
- News Feed: Members can view a feed of posts made by their connections.
- Post Interactions: Members can like and comment on posts.
- Notifications: Members receive notifications for: Connection requests, Likes/Comments on their posts
- Search: Members can search for other members by name.
- Modularity: The system should be organized into well separated components
- Extensibility: The design should be extensible to support future features like job postings, or premium accounts
- Maintainability: Code should follow object-oriented design principles and be easy to test, debug, and extend
With the requirements in place, the next step is to identify the core entities that will form the foundation of our design.