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Design notification and feed recommenders

Last updated: Mar 29, 2026

Quick Overview

This question evaluates an engineer's ability to design scalable, production-ready recommendation systems for notifications and home feeds, encompassing competencies in personalization, ranking, online serving, feature engineering, and balancing engagement with user experience while mitigating negative outcomes.

  • Pinterest
  • ML System Design
  • Machine Learning Engineer

Design notification and feed recommenders

Company: Pinterest

Role: Machine Learning Engineer

Category: ML System Design

Interview Round: Onsite

Design two recommendation systems for a large visual-discovery platform: 1. **Notification recommendation system**: Decide whether to send a notification to a user, which content to include, and when to send it. The goal is to increase long-term engagement without causing notification fatigue, unsubscribes, or spam complaints. 2. **Home-feed ranking system**: Rank candidate visual posts for each user session. The goal is to maximize high-quality engagement while preserving freshness, diversity, safety, and latency requirements. Discuss product goals, success metrics, data and labels, candidate generation, feature engineering, model choices, online serving architecture, experimentation, cold-start handling, exploration, and major failure modes.

Quick Answer: This question evaluates an engineer's ability to design scalable, production-ready recommendation systems for notifications and home feeds, encompassing competencies in personalization, ranking, online serving, feature engineering, and balancing engagement with user experience while mitigating negative outcomes.

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|Home/ML System Design/Pinterest

Design notification and feed recommenders

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Pinterest
Mar 8, 2026, 12:00 AM
Machine Learning EngineerOnsiteML System Design
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Design two recommendation systems for a large visual-discovery platform:

  1. Notification recommendation system : Decide whether to send a notification to a user, which content to include, and when to send it. The goal is to increase long-term engagement without causing notification fatigue, unsubscribes, or spam complaints.
  2. Home-feed ranking system : Rank candidate visual posts for each user session. The goal is to maximize high-quality engagement while preserving freshness, diversity, safety, and latency requirements.

Discuss product goals, success metrics, data and labels, candidate generation, feature engineering, model choices, online serving architecture, experimentation, cold-start handling, exploration, and major failure modes.

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