ML System Design Interview Questions
Practice 279 real ML System Design interview questions for 2026. Covers companies like OpenAI, Meta, Amazon, Anthropic, and Google. Real questions from actual interviews with detailed solutions. This collection targets ML System Design interview questions and interview preparation for roles that must bridge modeling, data engineering, and production reliability. What’s distinctive: expect LLM- and RAG-focused problems (inference efficiency, retrieval, hallucination controls), feature-store and data-lineage designs, real-time versus batch inference trade-offs, GPU/TPU serving patterns (batching, KV-caches), monitoring for data and concept drift, and production CI/CD for models. Interviewers evaluate your ability to clarify requirements, choose constraints-aware architectures, reason about cost and latency, and specify metrics and guardrails for safety and observability. To prepare, practice drawing layered diagrams (ingestion, storage, feature pipeline, training, registry, serving, monitoring), rehearse trade-offs aloud, and build short writeups outlining metrics, retraining strategy, and rollback/alerting plans. Focus on clear assumptions, end-to-end reproducibility, and concrete operational details that show you can ship and maintain ML at scale.

"I got asked a hardcore MCM DP question and I saw it on PracHub as well. Solved that question in 5 minutes. Without PracHub I doubt I could solve it in 5 hours. Though somehow didn't get hired, perhaps I guess I solved it too fast? /s"

"Believe me i'm a student here jn US. Recently interviewed for MSFT. They asked me exact question from PracHub. I saw it the night before and ignored it cause why waste time on random sites. I legit wanna go back and redo this whole thing if I had chance. Not saying will work for everyone but there is certainly some merit to that website. And i'm gonna use it in future prep from now on like lc tagged"

"10 years of experience but never worked at a top company. PracHub's senior-level questions helped me break into FAANG at 35. Age is just a number."

"I was skeptical about the 'real questions' claim, so I put it to the test. I searched for the exact question I got grilled on at my last Meta onsite... and it was right there. Word for word."

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"Literally just signed a $600k offer. I only had 2 weeks to prep, so I focused entirely on the company-tagged lists here. If you're targeting L5+, don't overthink it."

"Coaches and bootcamp prep courses cost around $200-300 but PracHub Premium is actually less than a Netflix subscription. And it landed me a $178K offer."

"I honestly don't know how you guys gather so many real interview questions. It's almost scary. I walked into my Amazon loop and recognized 3 out of 4 problems from your database."

"Discovered PracHub 10 days before my interview. By day 5, I stopped being nervous. By interview day, I was actually excited to show what I knew."

"I recently cleared Uber interviews (strong hire in the design round) and all the questions were present in prachub."
"The search is what sold me. I typed in a really niche DP problem I got asked last year and it actually came up, full breakdown and everything. These guys are clearly updating it constantly."
Design a Real-Time Feature Store
Design a real-time feature store for machine learning systems used in ads or recommendation ranking. Your design should support both: - Online inferen...
Design a batched inference API
Design an online machine learning inference service that supports dynamic batching. Multiple clients send small synchronous prediction requests to an ...
Design Harmful Content Detection
Design an end-to-end machine learning system to detect harmful user-generated content on a large online platform. Assume the platform accepts text and...
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 Recommendation Ranking System
You are interviewing for a staff-level machine learning role focused on recommendation systems. Design an online recommendation ranking system for a c...
Design AI chat bot system
Question Design an AI chatbot system with a front-end focus, under the following constraints: 1. User messages and conversation history are stored onl...
Design a hierarchical multi-label classifier
System Design: Hierarchical Multi-Label Classifier for Noisy Taxonomy Context You have a catalog of items with hierarchical tags (e.g., Category → Sub...
Improve Trust in a RAG System
You own an enterprise retrieval-augmented generation system used for high-stakes document question answering, such as mortgage underwriting, legal rev...
Design a production RAG system
Question Design a production retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) system for enterprise document QA. Walk through the end-to-end architecture and just...
Design notification and feed recommenders
Design two recommendation systems for a large visual-discovery platform: 1. Notification recommendation system: Decide whether to send a notification ...
Design an AWS fine-tuning platform for LLMs
Scenario You need to build a system that lets customers fine-tune their own large language model (LLM) on AWS. Task Design a managed platform where us...
Design an image/video near-duplicate detection system
Question Design a system to detect near-duplicate images/videos (e.g., reuploads, minor edits, different encodes) at large scale. Requirements - Suppo...
Design a Production ML Serving System
You are given an existing ML-powered production system that serves online user requests. The interview focuses not on changing the model architecture ...
Design a low-latency RAG system
System Design: Production-Grade RAG for Customer Support (p99 ≤ 1.5 s) Goal Design a production-ready retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) system for ...
Design a Location Recommendation System
Design a machine learning system that recommends places to a user in a maps or local-discovery product. A user opens the app and expects relevant near...
Design a feedback-text personalization data system
System/ML design scenario: personalize using user feedback text You are building an embeddings + personalization pipeline for a consumer product (e.g....
Design an app-store app recommendation system
You are building an app recommendation system for a mobile app store. Goal Recommend apps to a user on surfaces such as: - Home feed / “Recommended fo...
Design a video VLM end-to-end
Prompt: Design a video vision-language model (VLM) from scratch You are asked to design an end-to-end system to build a video vision-language model th...
Debug online worse than offline model performance
Production ML: online performance worse than offline You launch an ML model. Offline evaluation (validation/test) looked good, but after deployment th...
Design a news feed ranking system
Design a personalized news feed recommendation system. Requirements: - Low latency serving (real-time feed generation). - Personalization using user b...