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Design a System to Recommend Local Restaurant Profiles

Last updated: Mar 29, 2026

Quick Overview

This question evaluates a data scientist's ability to design an end-to-end local recommender system, including competencies in data sourcing and labeling, feature engineering, candidate generation and ranking, real-time serving, latency and freshness trade-offs, and privacy-safe handling of location data.

  • hard
  • Meta
  • Machine Learning
  • Data Scientist

Design a System to Recommend Local Restaurant Profiles

Company: Meta

Role: Data Scientist

Category: Machine Learning

Difficulty: hard

Interview Round: Onsite

##### Scenario Social media app wants to recommend local restaurants’ business pages in users’ news feeds (non-advertising). ##### Question Design a recommendation system to surface relevant restaurant business profiles to each user. Describe data sources, key features, model choice, and real-time ranking approach. How would you evaluate and iterate on this system both offline and online? ##### Hints Think user–restaurant interactions, embeddings, candidate generation + ranking, A/B testing metrics.

Quick Answer: This question evaluates a data scientist's ability to design an end-to-end local recommender system, including competencies in data sourcing and labeling, feature engineering, candidate generation and ranking, real-time serving, latency and freshness trade-offs, and privacy-safe handling of location data.

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Meta logo
Meta
Aug 4, 2025, 10:55 AM
Data Scientist
Onsite
Machine Learning
1
0

Recommending Local Restaurant Pages in the News Feed

Context

Design a non-ads recommendation system within a large social media app to surface local restaurant business profiles in each user’s news feed. The goal is to maximize relevant engagement (e.g., profile clicks, saves, follows) while meeting latency, privacy, and user experience constraints.

Task

Describe an end-to-end design covering:

  1. Data sources and labels
  2. Key features (user, restaurant, and context)
  3. Model choices for candidate generation and ranking
  4. Real-time serving and ranking approach (including latency and freshness)
  5. Evaluation and iteration plan (offline and online)

Assume you can use standard logging, a feature store, and nearline streams. Prioritize local relevance and privacy-safe use of location data.

Solution

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