Design the high-level system for a scalable Threads feature used by influencers

Problem Statement Description

Product context: Meta is a social technology company; its products include Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, Threads, Quest, creator tools, and ads.

You are designing the high-level system for a new Threads feature intended for influencers who create, publish, and manage high-volume public content for large follower audiences. The feature should support creator-scale usage patterns such as sudden traffic spikes, frequent posting, audience engagement, cross-surface visibility, and reliable delivery of updates to followers.

Assume this is a Meta technical PM interview focused on how you translate product needs into system requirements and architecture-level decisions. You do not need to write code or design every backend component in detail, but you should be able to define the user-facing requirements, key data flows, dependencies, operational constraints, and trade-offs needed to make the feature scalable and safe.

The experience should account for influencers as both content creators and audience builders, while also considering Meta’s broader ecosystem: social graph distribution, ranking, notifications, moderation, creator analytics, monetization readiness, and trust and safety at large scale.

The experience should consider:

- Core influencer workflows, including content creation, publishing, audience engagement, performance tracking, and managing high-volume interactions

- Functional and non-functional requirements, including latency, throughput, availability, freshness, consistency, and scale during viral moments

- Key APIs, services, and data objects needed to support content, users, followers, engagement events, notifications, analytics, and moderation signals

- Privacy, safety, integrity, and abuse-prevention requirements for public creator content and follower interactions

- Reliability expectations, including degradation behavior, retries, rate limits, caching, backpressure, and failure handling

- Observability needs such as logging, metrics, alerting, experimentation, creator-facing analytics, and operational dashboards

- Rollout approach, including phased launches, eligibility controls, A/B testing, migration risks, and rollback mechanisms

- Product trade-offs between creator reach, system cost, ranking quality, real-time engagement, notification volume, and platform safety

Your goal is to frame a scalable high-level system that can support influencer-grade usage on Threads while balancing product experience, technical feasibility, reliability, privacy, and safety.