ML System Design Interview Questions
Master your tech interview with our curated database of real questions from top companies.
Explain ML model fundamentals
Comprehensive ML Concepts: Logistic Regression, Naive Bayes, Transformers, Multi-class Metrics, Bagging vs Boosting Context You are interviewing for a...
Discuss Transformer LLM Design
System-Design-Oriented LLM Question Context: You are designing, fine-tuning, and operating a Transformer-based large language model (LLM) that answers...
Design feedback-driven recommender
Design: Contextual Bandit Recommendation with Online Learning You are designing an online learning recommendation system. At each user interaction: - ...
Discuss ML infrastructure fundamentals
ML System Design: Infra Stack, Feature Store, Reproducibility, and Monitoring Context: You are designing and operating a machine learning platform tha...
Design file-embedding storage system
System Design: Multimodal Embedding Service for User Uploads Context You are designing a backend service that, for each user-uploaded asset, generates...
Design query generation system
System Design: Query-Generation to Maximize CTR Context You are designing a real-time system that generates and ranks search query suggestions shown t...
Explain ML statistics and model design concepts
Technical Phone Screen: Theory + System Design Probability and Statistics 1. Define a moment generating function (MGF) and explain how it is used. 2. ...
Design a harmful content detection system
System Design: End-to-End Harmful Content Detection (Multilingual, Multimodal) Context You are designing a safety system for a large, mobile-first, ep...
Train LinearSVC to beat baseline accuracy
Task: Train and Evaluate a LinearSVC to Beat a Baseline Context You are given a binary or multi-class classification dataset split into train and hidd...
Design an LLM-based binary classifier
Design a Binary Text Classifier Using Only a Log-Probability Scoring Helper Context You are building a binary text classifier without fine-tuning. You...
Explain parallelism and collectives in training
Parallelism strategies and communication in large-scale training You are designing a distributed training setup for very large neural networks that ca...
Design ML system for self-driving perception
You are interviewing for a Senior Machine Learning Engineer role on a self-driving car team. They ask you to design a machine learning system for obst...
Design pipeline using classification and embedding services
You are given two black-box ML services: 1. Classification Service - Input: One or more text documents. - Output: A label for each document (e.g...
Design an LLM quality validation system
You are asked to design an end-to-end LLM quality validation system for a team that trains and serves large language models. The goal is to automatica...
Design a real-time recommendation system
You are asked to design a real-time recommendation system for a large-scale consumer product (for example, recommending items or content to users in a...
Design system to detect privacy-leak records
You are given a very large database that contains user data (both structured fields and unstructured text such as logs, messages, and documents). The ...
Explain ML compilation optimizations and hardware fit
ML Compiler Optimizations and Platform Targeting Context You are designing a compiler/runtime stack for deep learning workloads that must run efficien...
Design real-time grid ETA for drivers
Real-Time Grid-ETA System Design You are tasked with designing a real-time system that maintains the remaining ETA for every driver currently located ...
Design a Static Audio Detection System
System Design: Static Audio Detection Pipeline Context Design an offline (non-live) audio detection system that processes static audio files (e.g., us...
Design a Multimodal Neural Network
Design Prompt: Multimodal Text–Image Retrieval and Classification Context You are building a production system that uses both text (titles/description...