Review an inference API design for scale
AnthropicSoftware Engineer · OnsiteLast updated
This question tests a candidate's ability to critically evaluate ML system designs for production-scale inference APIs, covering multi-tenancy, GPU resource constraints, and streaming token delivery. It assesses architectural reasoning across reliability, latency trade-offs, and capacity planning in the ML Systems domain.
You are reviewing another engineer’s design doc for a machine-learning inference API. Critique and improve it with a focus on distributed systems: clarify product and latency/availability SLOs; estimate throughput and capacity; propose autoscaling, batching, and GPU/accelerator scheduling; handle model loading, versioning, and rollback; design multi-tenant isolation and rate limiting; prevent overload with backpressure, queues, and circuit breakers; define idempotency, retries, and timeouts; mitigate cold starts; specify caching strategy (weights, tokens) and token streaming; plan traffic shaping (canary, A/B), shadowing, and safe rollback; define monitoring, alerting, and error budgets; address privacy, safety filters, audit logs, and cost controls. Provide a high-level architecture and call out key trade-offs.
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