Design an Inference Pipeline
Company: Nuro
Role: Machine Learning Engineer
Category: ML System Design
Difficulty: hard
Interview Round: Technical Screen
Design a production machine-learning inference pipeline for a service that serves predictions to downstream applications.
Your design should cover:
- How online prediction requests enter the system and are routed to models.
- How model artifacts are stored, versioned, validated, and deployed.
- How features are fetched or computed at inference time.
- How to support low latency, high availability, scalability, and safe rollouts.
- How to monitor model quality, data drift, latency, errors, and resource usage.
- How to handle rollback, A/B testing, and canary deployment for new model versions.
Quick Answer: This question evaluates competency in designing production machine-learning inference pipelines, covering model routing, artifact versioning and deployment, feature retrieval at inference time, low-latency/high-availability architectures, monitoring for model quality and data drift, and safe rollout strategies.