Design A/B testing platform

Quick Overview

This question evaluates a candidate's competency in designing scalable, privacy-compliant A/B testing platforms, covering deterministic bucketing, traffic allocation, telemetry and event pipelines, experiment governance, and applied statistical methods in the Analytics & Experimentation domain.

Design A/B testing platform

Company: Google

Role: Software Engineer

Category: Analytics & Experimentation

Difficulty: hard

Interview Round: Technical Screen

Design an A/B testing platform supporting experiment definition, randomization, exposure logging, metric computation, and guardrails. Describe bucketing, unit consistency, incremental rollout, bias avoidance, and statistical analysis and diagnostics.

Quick Answer: This question evaluates a candidate's competency in designing scalable, privacy-compliant A/B testing platforms, covering deterministic bucketing, traffic allocation, telemetry and event pipelines, experiment governance, and applied statistical methods in the Analytics & Experimentation domain.

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Sep 6, 2025, 12:00 AM
hardSoftware EngineerTechnical ScreenAnalytics & Experimentation
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Design an A/B Testing Platform (Architecture + Experiment Science)

Context

You are designing an A/B testing platform for a large-scale consumer web/mobile product. The platform must support millions of users, low-latency assignment, privacy compliance, and both real-time and batch analytics. Multiple experiments can run concurrently across different product surfaces.

Requirements

Design the platform end-to-end to support:

  1. Experiment definition and configuration (namespaces/layers, eligibility/targeting, traffic allocation, variants, start/stop).
  2. Deterministic randomization and bucketing with sticky assignment and unit consistency across devices/sessions.
  3. Exposure logging and event telemetry with deduplication and identity stitching.
  4. Metric computation (batch + streaming), including definitions for conversions, retention, ratios, quantiles, and experiment-scoped windows.
  5. Incremental rollout, governance, and guardrails (e.g., SRM, kill switches, safety metrics).
  6. Bias avoidance and experiment hygiene (triggering, intent-to-treat, overlap management, AA tests).
  7. Statistical analysis and diagnostics (power, variance reduction, CIs/p-values, sequential monitoring, multiple testing, cluster-robust errors, diagnostics dashboards).

In your answer, describe:

  • Bucketing and traffic allocation
  • Unit of randomization and unit consistency
  • Incremental rollout and guardrails
  • Bias avoidance practices
  • Statistical analysis and diagnostics
  • A high-level architecture and data flow
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