Model Development Challenges: Detection, Alternatives, Solution, Evidence
Context: In a technical screen for a Machine Learning Engineer, you are asked to demonstrate end-to-end ownership of a production ML problem by walking through key challenges and how you resolved them.
Prompt: Describe 1–2 of the most significant challenges you faced while developing and deploying an ML model. For each challenge, cover:
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Detection: How you discovered or measured the issue.
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Alternatives: What approaches you evaluated and their trade-offs.
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Solution: The approach you implemented and why.
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Evidence: Before/after metrics demonstrating impact (e.g., PR AUC, calibration error, recall@precision, latency p99, QPS, cost savings).
Common challenge categories include:
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Data quality (missingness, schema drift), data leakage
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Class imbalance, overfitting/underfitting
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Non-stationarity (covariate/label shift), limited labels
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Serving constraints (latency/throughput/memory), reliability/monitoring