Design Retrieval for a Coding Agent: What to Index, Handling Noise, and Metrics
Company: Databricks
Role: Software Engineer
Category: ML System Design
Difficulty: medium
Interview Round: Onsite
Overview: Design the retrieval layer that feeds code and documentation to an LLM coding agent, deciding what to index, how to split and rank it, how to handle noise, and which metrics prove it works. The question tests code-aware indexing, hybrid lexical and dense retrieval, reranking, freshness, and offline and end-to-end evaluation design.