Inventory correctness across stores and warehouses, order orchestration, and traffic peaks with a hard calendar date.
Walmart design questions come from omnichannel retail, which is harder than it first sounds: inventory exists physically in stores and warehouses, is reserved by online orders, and is simultaneously being sold at a till. Designing a system where the count is right enough to sell against, without locking on every read, is the recurring problem.
Order orchestration follows - splitting an order across fulfilment locations, handling partial availability, cancellation and returns as first-class flows rather than afterthoughts. The scale conversation is unusual in that the peaks have known dates: Black Friday traffic is predictable, so capacity planning and load shedding are fair, concrete questions rather than hypotheticals.
45-60 min
Two rounds at medium difficulty with complexity discussion.
60 min
Inventory consistency, order orchestration, peak event capacity.
60 min
Model a cart, order or inventory domain in code.
45 min
Ownership, scale of impact and collaboration.
Stock is physical and contended. It is reserved by online orders while being sold in-store, so you need a reservation model with expiry, an accepted staleness window for reads, and a clear answer for what the customer sees when the count was wrong.
Concretely, because the dates are known in advance. Expect capacity planning with real numbers, pre-scaling, queueing, and which features you would shed first if the system started to saturate.
Commonly, particularly in India-based teams - modelling a cart, order or inventory domain in working code with clean class boundaries.
Practise the rounds Walmart actually runs, and get scored on where you stand.