Design a ChatGPT-like conversational assistant
PlaidSoftware Engineer · Technical Screen
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This question evaluates a candidate's ability to design large-scale conversational AI systems, covering competencies in distributed system architecture, real-time streaming, stateful multi-turn session management, safety controls, and integration with external tools.
Design a ChatGPT-like conversational assistant product.
Assume you need to support:
- Multi-turn chat with conversation history
- Streaming responses (token-by-token)
- High availability and low latency at peak traffic
- Basic safety controls (prompt injection awareness, toxicity filtering, PII handling)
- Optional tool use (e.g., calling internal search or a calculator)
Describe the high-level architecture, key components, data storage, scaling strategy, and how you would evaluate quality and safety in production.
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