Design an LLM-Based Conversational Assistant (Chatbot)
Company: Meta
Role: Machine Learning Engineer
Category: ML System Design
Difficulty: hard
Interview Round: Onsite
Quick Answer: This question evaluates the ability to design an end-to-end LLM-based conversational assistant, covering pretraining, alignment, retrieval, and serving. It tests understanding of how base language models are turned into safe, helpful chatbots through fine-tuning and preference optimization, and how they stay factual and current through retrieval and tool use. Commonly asked in ML system design interviews to assess architectural and trade-off reasoning at a practical, applied level.