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.
Design two recommendation systems for a large visual-discovery platform:
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.