Machine Learning Engineer 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 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...
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 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...
Implement KV cache for inference
Design Task: Key–Value Cache for Transformer Decoder Inference Context You are building an autoregressive inference engine for a Transformer decoder-o...
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 an ML search system
Design an ML‑Powered Enterprise Document Search System Context You are designing a multi‑tenant enterprise search system that indexes documents from m...
Architect an asynchronous RL post-training system
System Design: Asynchronous RLHF/RLAIF Post-Training for a Production Chat LLM Context You operate a chat LLM that already serves real user traffic. Y...
Implement a trie-based tokenizer
Design and Implement a Trie-Based Subword Tokenizer for LLM Pretraining Context You are building a subword tokenizer for a large-scale LLM pretraining...
Design real-time top-K POI retrieval on maps
Real-Time Top-K POIs in Viewport: System Design Context Design a real-time system for a mobile map that continuously shows the top-K points of interes...
Debug a GPT training pipeline
Fix three bugs in a minimal GPT to meet a training-loss target You are given a Colab notebook with a minimal GPT-style language model implemented in P...
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...