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Design systems for global request detection and labeling

Last updated: Mar 29, 2026

Quick Overview

This question evaluates the ability to design scalable, low-latency ML systems for global streaming event detection and rapid labeling under extreme class imbalance, assessing competencies in stream ingestion and partitioning, time-windowed aggregations, serving/alerting layers, and end-to-end labeling pipelines.

  • hard
  • Amazon
  • ML System Design
  • Machine Learning Engineer

Design systems for global request detection and labeling

Company: Amazon

Role: Machine Learning Engineer

Category: ML System Design

Difficulty: hard

Interview Round: Onsite

Answer the following ML system design questions. State assumptions, propose an architecture, and discuss scaling, latency, and reliability. ## 1) Global device request detection (streaming) An internal platform receives **IT requests** from many device types across the world. - Data volume is very large. - Events update continuously. - Timestamps are precise to **milliseconds**. **Design a system that can quickly detect “where requests are happening”** (e.g., by region/site/device type) in near real-time. Cover: - Ingestion, partitioning/sharding, storage - Stream processing and aggregations (time windows) - Query/serving layer (dashboards/alerts) - Handling out-of-order events, duplicates, clock skew - Reliability and SLOs ## 2) Fast labeling under extreme class imbalance You have a very large dataset where the positive class is **extremely rare** (highly imbalanced). You need to **label examples quickly** to build a model. Design an end-to-end labeling strategy/pipeline. Cover: - Sampling strategy to find positives - Human-in-the-loop workflow - Weak supervision / heuristics - Active learning - How you measure progress and prevent bias

Quick Answer: This question evaluates the ability to design scalable, low-latency ML systems for global streaming event detection and rapid labeling under extreme class imbalance, assessing competencies in stream ingestion and partitioning, time-windowed aggregations, serving/alerting layers, and end-to-end labeling pipelines.

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Amazon
Feb 9, 2026, 12:00 AM
Machine Learning Engineer
Onsite
ML System Design
3
0
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Answer the following ML system design questions. State assumptions, propose an architecture, and discuss scaling, latency, and reliability.

1) Global device request detection (streaming)

An internal platform receives IT requests from many device types across the world.

  • Data volume is very large.
  • Events update continuously.
  • Timestamps are precise to milliseconds .

Design a system that can quickly detect “where requests are happening” (e.g., by region/site/device type) in near real-time.

Cover:

  • Ingestion, partitioning/sharding, storage
  • Stream processing and aggregations (time windows)
  • Query/serving layer (dashboards/alerts)
  • Handling out-of-order events, duplicates, clock skew
  • Reliability and SLOs

2) Fast labeling under extreme class imbalance

You have a very large dataset where the positive class is extremely rare (highly imbalanced). You need to label examples quickly to build a model.

Design an end-to-end labeling strategy/pipeline. Cover:

  • Sampling strategy to find positives
  • Human-in-the-loop workflow
  • Weak supervision / heuristics
  • Active learning
  • How you measure progress and prevent bias

Solution

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