These are HLD questions of the kind Salesforce actually asks — the patterns reported from Salesforce's AI-engineering rounds, where design trade-offs, scale and failure modes matter as much as definitions. Treat this page as a mock interview: say every answer out loud before revealing it. If one surprises you, the lesson behind it is linked at the bottom.
Salesforce HLD concept questions
Salesforce interviewers often ask how to prevent one very large, very active tenant (customer) in a shared multi-tenant system from degrading performance for all the smaller tenants sharing the same infrastructure.
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Salesforce lets each customer define their own custom fields and objects. Why can't this be implemented by just letting each tenant run ALTER TABLE on a shared relational schema?
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Salesforce HLD applied & hands-on questions
Salesforce-style: design a rate limiter that gives each tenant (customer organization) its own API quota, independent of how many individual users that tenant has.
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How to use this page: Salesforce rarely asks something you've never seen — they ask a standard HLD concept and then push one level deeper ("why?", "what would you do if..."). Master the concept in the HLD course lessons, and the follow-up stops being scary.
Keep practising: Caching Explained, Databases at Scale, Design a URL Shortener and Interview Framework cover what most Salesforce HLD rounds test.