Design Ads Platform for Spotify — Spotify — Intervues

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Design Ads Platform for Spotify[ OK ] 152 — full content available
[ INFO ] category: System Design  difficulty: hard  freq: high  first seen: 2026-01-12
[HARD][SYSTEM DESIGN][HIGH]data_engineeringFrequency Cappingwebmachine_learningSystem DesignReal-timebackendAdvertising
$ cat problem.md
Design an advertising platform for Spotify that serves image banner ads in the Spotify client.
Requirements:
Serve image banner ads to users
Limit how often a user sees the same ad (frequency capping)
Limit total impressions per ad campaign
Track ad impressions and clicks
Support targeting (by region, demographics, listening habits)
Low latency ad serving (< 100ms)
Key Components:
Ad Serving Service
Frequency Capping Service (Redis)
Ad Inventory/Campaign Management
Impression/Click Tracking
CDN for ad images
Analytics Pipeline
Discussion Points:
How to handle frequency capping at scale?
How to ensure ads are served within latency budget?
How to handle ad targeting based on user listening history?
Consistency vs availability tradeoffs for impression counting
How to prevent ad fraud?
user@intervues:~/spotify$ 