Software Engineer ML System Design Interview Questions
Master your tech interview with our curated database of real questions from top companies.
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 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...
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 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 a personalized recommendation system
System Design: Personalized Recommendations for a Consumer App Context Assume you are building the home-feed recommendations for a large consumer app ...
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...
Review an inference API design for scale
System Design Review: Machine-Learning Inference API (Distributed Systems Focus) Background You are reviewing a teammate’s design document for a produ...
Design an ML inference orchestration platform
System Design: ML Inference Orchestration Platform Context You are designing a multi-tenant platform that exposes several ML models as independent ser...
Design an AI chatbot with browser storage
System Design: Browser-Only Chatbot With Streaming and No Server-Side Conversation Storage Context Design an AI chatbot where all user messages and co...
Design a secure ML data platform
System Design: Secure, Ethical, Multi‑Tenant ML Data and Inference Platform Context Design a cloud-based ML platform used by multiple internal product...
Design scalable, highly available GenAI serving
System Design: Highly Scalable, Highly Available Generative AI Inference Platform Context Design a production-grade deployment for a generative AI tex...
Build and design a Mistral RAG agent
Design and Implement a Minimal LLM-Powered RAG Agent (Python, Mistral API) Context You are asked to build a minimal, but production-minded, retrieval-...
Design a low-latency ML inference API
System Design: Low‑Latency ML Inference API (Real‑Time) Context You are designing an in‑region, synchronous inference API used by product surfaces (e....
Build models for housing and wind power prediction
Two-Part Machine Learning Take-Home Part 1 — Binary Classification: "Can Buy" vs "Cannot Buy" Given applicant and market data, design a binary classif...
Design a feature store with CI/CD and reliability
System Design: Feature Store for Offline Training and Low‑Latency Online Inference Context You are designing a feature store to support machine learni...
Design a GPU inference API
System Design: GPU-Backed Inference Platform and API You are designing a production inference platform to serve deep learning models (vision, ranking,...
Design an e-commerce recommendation system
Design an Amazon-Scale E‑Commerce Product Recommendation System Context You are designing a large-scale recommendation system that powers multiple use...
Design a multimodal embedding service
System Design: Multimodal Embedding Pipeline for Documents, Images, and Videos You are designing a production service that computes embeddings for use...
Build a Mistral-powered RAG agent
Build a Minimal RAG Tool Using the Mistral API Context You have an API token and need to implement a small retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) tool i...