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Design a Single-Domain Chatbot

DecagonSoftware Engineer · Onsite
MediumSoftware EngineerOnsiteML System Design

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This question evaluates a candidate's ability to design production-grade conversational AI systems, testing competencies in retrieval-augmented generation, document ingestion and indexing, multi-turn session management, prompt construction, model serving, grounding and citation, safety, access control, monitoring, and operational trade-offs.

Design a chatbot system for a single enterprise customer and a single business domain. For example, the chatbot may answer support questions for one product line or one internal knowledge domain.

The system should:

  • support multi-turn conversations,
  • answer questions using the customer's approved documents and FAQs,
  • provide grounded answers with citations or source references,
  • avoid hallucinating unsupported information,
  • allow administrators to update the knowledge base,
  • support fallback to a human agent when confidence is low,
  • meet reasonable latency and cost targets.

Discuss the end-to-end design, including:

  • user-facing APIs and session management,
  • document ingestion and indexing,
  • retrieval and ranking,
  • prompt construction and model serving,
  • safety and access control,
  • monitoring and evaluation,
  • scaling and reliability trade-offs.