Design a Product Catalog Service

Requirements

• •Allow searching products by keyword with full-text search
• •Support faceted filtering by category, price range, brand, and attributes
• •Return paginated search results sorted by relevance or price
• •Display real-time or near-real-time stock availability per product
• •Support bulk product ingestion and incremental updates from a catalog management system

Non-Functional Requirements

• •Search query latency < 100ms (p99)
• •Catalog of up to 10 million products
• •Product updates reflected in search within 30 seconds
• •10,000 search queries/second at peak

Constraints

• •Catalog is read-heavy; product writes happen infrequently
• •Inventory levels are updated by a separate inventory service
• •No personalized recommendations in v1 — results are relevance-ranked only

Evaluation Criteria