System design final year project ideas
System design final year project ideas from the free Sefism library, each scoped for a single semester with a suggested stack and deliverables.
- 300 project ideas
Ideas and guidance, not finished projects
These are project ideas and scoping guidance, published free for students to use as a starting point. I do not build, write, or sell final-year projects, and I do not complete coursework for anyone. Take an idea, make it yours, and build it.
24 ideas
Kubernetes Network Policy Generator With Pre-Apply Connectivity Tests to Stop Lateral Movement
Build a tool that watches which services in a Kubernetes cluster actually talk to each other, generates least-connection network policies from that traffic, and tests them in CI against the expected connectivity before they are applied, so nothing legitimate breaks. Most clusters run with no network policies at all, which lets an attacker who breaks into one pod reach every database and internal API. This makes locking them down safe enough to actually do.
Self-Hosted Virtual Waiting Room for Exam Result and Admission Day Traffic Spikes
Build a self-hostable virtual waiting room that sits in front of a fragile website and admits visitors at a rate the site can handle, with signed tokens, fair ordering and honest wait estimates. Exam boards, universities and scholarship portals see huge spikes on result and deadline days and often slow to a crawl. The project ends with a load test that shows the origin staying healthy while hundreds of thousands of simulated users wait in line.
Multi-Model LLM Serving With Scale to Zero on a Few Shared GPUs
Build a serving layer that lets a university lab or small company host many open language models and fine-tuned adapters on two to four GPUs, loading each model when requests arrive and unloading idle ones. The research focus is cold start: loading a model in seconds rather than minutes using local checkpoint caching, a fast loading format and smart placement. Teams get many models without paying for a GPU per model.
Offline-First Update System for School and Clinic Device Fleets on Poor Connections
Build an update system for fleets of Linux devices in rural schools, clinics or shops, such as Raspberry Pi kiosks or low-cost PCs, where the internet is slow, metered or missing for days. It ships small delta updates, lets one device on a site download once and share with the rest over the local network, accepts updates from a USB stick, and rolls back automatically if a device fails to boot.
Zero-Downtime PostgreSQL Migration Checker with Lock Testing in CI
A CI tool that catches database migrations likely to cause downtime before they reach production: it lints PostgreSQL migration SQL, then replays it against a shadow database under simulated traffic and reports the locks taken, how long they were held and which queries were blocked. An advanced cloud and DevOps final year project.
Usage Metering and Billing Engine for API Products
A developer-facing web service that ingests usage events from API and SaaS products, aggregates them into billable metrics, applies tiered and package pricing, and produces invoices and customer usage dashboards. An advanced final year project in backend systems, correctness and developer tools.
Tamper-Evident Audit Log Service with Merkle Proofs for Fintech Apps
An append-only audit log service for fintech and health apps where every entry is chained into a Merkle tree, so any later edit or deletion can be detected and proven to an auditor with a small cryptographic proof. An advanced security final year project inspired by Certificate Transparency and Google's Trillian.
Server-Authoritative Browser Multiplayer Game with Prediction and Lag Compensation
A fast-paced browser multiplayer game with an authoritative server, client-side prediction, server reconciliation, entity interpolation and lag-compensated hit detection, plus a network conditions lab to measure how it feels at high ping. An advanced final year project in game netcode and realtime distributed systems.
Restaurant Kitchen Display System with Station Routing
A browser-based kitchen display system for small restaurants that takes orders from waiters and table QR codes, routes each item to the right station (grill, fryer, tandoor, drinks) and tracks prep times live. A realtime final year project for food service businesses that still run on paper chits.
Real-Time Transaction Fraud Rules Engine with Case Review for Fintech Startups
A real-time fraud scoring service for fintech startups and wallets that evaluates each payment against analyst-written rules and a machine learning risk score in under 100 ms, then routes risky ones to a case review queue. An advanced security and fintech final year project combining streaming features, a rule language and model evaluation.
Real-Time Collaborative Web Level Editor for 2D Game Teams
A browser-based 2D level editor where several designers edit the same tilemap and entities at once, with live cursors, conflict-free merging, undo per user, version history and export to Godot, Unity and Tiled formats. An advanced game tooling final year project built on CRDTs and realtime sync.
Public Procurement Red-Flag Analytics with Supplier Entity Resolution
A final year project that builds an open data analytics platform for public procurement contracts, linking the many spellings of the same supplier into one entity and computing integrity red flags such as single bidding and contract splitting. Built for journalists, auditors and civic groups working with open contracting data.
Persistent Message Broker with Consumer Groups Built From Scratch
A message broker built from scratch with an append-only log on disk, topics and partitions, consumer groups with committed offsets and at-least-once delivery. An advanced systems final year project for students who want to understand how Kafka-style brokers work, with crash tests and a benchmark report.
Offline Order Booking and Route Planner for Field Sales Reps
A final year project that builds a mobile app for FMCG and pharma field sales reps who visit 30 or more shops a day: an offline day plan, a suggested visit order, order booking against stock and credit limits, and sync when signal returns. Aimed at small distributors who cannot afford enterprise tools.
Offline-First Point of Sale Web App for Multi-Till Retail Shops
A browser-based point of sale for grocery stores, bakeries and general retail shops that keeps selling during internet and power cuts, syncs several tills and a back office without losing or double counting stock, and issues valid receipt numbers offline. An advanced final year project in local-first web engineering.
Offline Classroom Content Sharing over Wi-Fi Direct for Schools
A final year project that builds an Android app for teachers and students in schools with little or no internet: one downloaded lesson pack spreads phone to phone over Wi-Fi Direct and Bluetooth, and quiz results flow back to the teacher the same way. Content-addressed sync, resumable transfers and a real classroom trial.
Multi-Tenant SaaS Control Plane with Pool and Silo Tenant Isolation
A control plane that small B2B SaaS teams can drop in to onboard tenants, isolate their data with PostgreSQL row-level security or a dedicated database, meter usage and move a large tenant from the shared pool to its own silo without downtime. An advanced cloud and DevOps final year project on multi-tenant architecture.
Job Shop Work Order Tracker for Small Manufacturers
A web app for small manufacturers and job shops (fabrication, furniture, printing, garments) to turn customer orders into work orders, track each operation on the shop floor from a shared tablet, and compare quoted versus actual time and cost. An intermediate final year project in manufacturing software.
GitOps Agent for Docker Compose Servers with Drift Detection
A pull-based GitOps agent for teams that run Docker Compose on ordinary VPS instead of Kubernetes: it reconciles each server with a Git repository, detects and reports manual drift, and rolls back a failed deploy using health checks. An intermediate cloud and DevOps final year project.
Double-Entry Ledger Service for Marketplace Wallets and Payouts
A double-entry ledger service for marketplaces and wallet apps that records every rupee or dollar as balanced entries, handles holds, refunds and seller payouts, and proves its balances are correct. A fintech final year project in systems design, idempotency and concurrency, modelled on how Stripe and Uber track money movement.
Courier Dispatch with Cash on Delivery Reconciliation and Merchant Payouts
A web platform for small courier and last-mile delivery companies that assigns parcels to riders, tracks cash on delivery from doorstep to bank, and produces accurate payout statements for online sellers. An advanced final year project in logistics and fintech built on a double-entry ledger.
Column-Level Data Lineage and Impact Analysis from SQL Code
A final year project that builds a column-level data lineage tool for analytics teams: it parses SQL and dbt models, works out which source columns feed every dashboard field, and warns in a pull request when a change will break or alter downstream reports. A data engineering project with a compiler-style core.
Caching Edge Proxy with Tag-Based Purge for Small Hosting Providers
A small content delivery network that a regional hosting provider can run on a few servers: a caching reverse proxy written from scratch with request coalescing and stale-while-revalidate, plus a purge system that clears every page tagged with a product or post across all nodes within seconds. An advanced cloud and DevOps final year project.
Approval Workflow Engine with Escalations for Small Offices
An approval workflow engine for small offices, schools and NGOs that turns purchase requests, leave, reimbursements and document sign-offs into tracked flows with deadlines, escalations and email or WhatsApp-style reminders. A no-code automation final year project with a durable workflow runtime and an audit trail.
Browse project ideas by domain and difficulty
Each of these is its own page, so you can send someone straight to the AI ideas or the beginner ones.
Stuck on something specific?
Writing only gets you so far. If you want an answer to your situation rather than the general case, book a session and we will work through it together. Sessions are free for approved Sefism members, and a few slots open each week.
- 1:1 Mentorship
- Fresh Graduate Mentorship
- Career Guidance
Brand deals, promos and partnerships: tauseeffayyaz@gmail.com
Follow along
New writing, resources and project ideas land here first.