Design a corporate meeting room & workspace booking platform
PremiumBackend systemMedium
- Resource allocation
- Concurrency control
- Interval search
Quick answer
This backend system interview question asks you to design a corporate meeting room & workspace booking platform. Aim for a design that meets its requirements at the stated scale, then explain its main components, data flow and trade-offs. Interviewers want to see how you scope the problem, size it and defend each choice.
The problem
Design a Corporate Meeting Room & Workspace Booking Platform. Large global organizations use this platform to manage their real estate, allowing employees to discover and reserve collaboration spaces, conference rooms, and hot-desks across multiple office locations.
Employees use the platform to search for available workspaces based on location, capacity, amenities, and specific time slots. The system must process reservations, strictly prevent overlapping double-bookings for any single resource, and integrate with external enterprise calendars. To optimize office utilization, the system enforces a strict auto-release policy: if an employee does not "check in" to their reserved room within 15 minutes of the start time, the reservation is automatically canceled and the room becomes available again.
What must a corporate meeting room & workspace booking platform do?
- Workspace Discovery: Search for available resources by office building, capacity, amenities (e.g., whiteboards, video conferencing), and overlapping time slots.
- Reservation Management: Book a workspace for a specific duration, strictly preventing any double-bookings for the same room and time.
What scale should you design for?
Use these numbers in your estimates.
The scale numbers unlock with this questionUnlock
Key concepts
- Resource allocation
- Concurrency control
- Interval search
- Event driven
- Enterprise architecture
How you’ll practise
- Requirements
- Estimate
- API and data
- High-level design
- Deep dives
- Wrap-up
Lala, personalized to you, gives a hint when you ask and reviews your design when you are ready.
What do interviewers look for?
In any backend system design round.
- Clarifies the requirements before drawing anything
- Uses a few numbers that actually change the design
- Draws a clear path from the client to storage
- Picks storage and caching with reasons, not by habit
- Explains what breaks first under load and how to fix it
- States trade-offs openly instead of claiming a perfect design
Questions people ask about this interview question
- Which design type is this question?
- It is a backend system question. You design a corporate meeting room & workspace booking platform and explain your choices the way you would in an interview.
- Is this question asked at entry level?
- It is marked Medium. Entry-level engineers can practise it, but it expects you to reason about requirements and trade-offs, not only list components.
- What should I cover first?
- Start with the requirements: what the system must do, how well it must do it and which numbers change the design. Agree on scope with the interviewer before you design anything.
- Can I practise it for free?
- It is a premium question. Sign up and unlock it once for 10 credits; it then stays unlocked. When you finish, Lala, your personalized AI mentor, can review your design for 30 credits.
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Updated · Written by the SevyDevy team