Machine Learning Engineer System Design Interview Questions
Practice the exact questions companies are asking right now.
Design a regional surge pricing strategy
Scenario You operate a ride-hailing platform. You need to design a system that sets surge multipliers (dynamic pricing) for a given region. Task Desig...
Validate virtual credit card transactions from encoded IDs
You are designing logic for a virtual credit card product. Part 1: Product reasoning Explain key benefits and drawbacks of virtual credit cards for: -...
Design a search query autocomplete system
Question Design a search autocomplete system that suggests completions as the user types. Requirements - Sub-100ms latency per keystroke. - Suggestion...
Design a multimodal RAG assistant
Prompt Design a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) system that can answer user questions using an internal knowledge base containing multiple modali...
Design an S3-like object storage service
Design a cloud object storage service similar to Amazon S3. The service should allow clients to upload, store, and download large files reliably and e...
Design versioned in-memory key-value store
You are asked to design an in-memory key–value store that supports versioning and rollback. Requirements - Store key–value pairs in memory (string key...
Design a scalable recommendation serving system
Scenario You are designing the online serving infrastructure for a large-scale recommendation system (e.g., a delivery app or e-commerce feed). The in...
Design a recommendation system
System Design: Large-Scale Home-Feed Recommendation System Problem Design a large-scale recommendation system for a consumer app's home feed. Describe...
Design scalable media storage and delivery
System Design: Global UGC Photos and Short Videos Store/Delivery Context Design a globally distributed system to store and deliver user-generated phot...
Design a scalable service and model performance
System Design: Multi-Region, 50k QPS, p95 < 100 ms Context Design an online, read-heavy key-value service (for example, a user profile or feature look...
Design and implement a word-guessing game
Word-Guessing Game (Wordle-like) — Design and Implement Context Build a small, standalone command-line application that lets a user guess a secret wor...
Implement compiler for custom language
Design and implement a simple compiler/interpreter Goal Design and implement a small compiler/interpreter for a bespoke toy language in your preferred...
Optimize MapReduce performance
MapReduce Model and Optimization for Parallel Efficiency and Network Utilization Context You are designing a large-scale batch processing job (e.g., f...
Design a scalable MapReduce pipeline
Design a Large-Scale MapReduce-Style Data Processing System Context You are designing a batch pipeline, using a MapReduce-style architecture, to aggre...
Design and implement a tiny language runtime
Minimal Imperative Language — Design and Implementation Task Context You are asked to design and implement a minimal imperative language and its tooli...
Design a distributed key-value store
Design a Distributed Key–Value Store (Technical Screen) Context You're designing a cloud-native, multi-tenant key–value (KV) storage service for inter...
Design a scalable metrics monitoring system
Design a Metrics Monitoring System for Large-Scale Services Context You are designing a metrics monitoring system for large-scale, cloud-native micros...
Design async job orchestration and notification service
System Design: Batch Orchestration Over an External Asynchronous Cluster Context You are designing a backend service that accepts a list of job parame...
Design an in-memory database
System Design: In-Memory Key–Value Database for Ultra–Low Latency Context You are designing an in-memory, per-node key–value database optimized for ul...