Topic
ML System Design interview questions
332 ML System Design questions from 100 companies, with hints, runnable code and solution walkthroughs.
13 easy187 medium132 hard
ML System Design interview questions by the numbers
Last updated
Katkat has 332 ML System Design interview questions from 100 companies; the most come from OpenAI (7%), Meta (7%) and Anthropic (6%). By difficulty: 4% easy, 56% medium and 40% hard. The most common round is Onsite (56%). Frequent concepts include System Design, ML System Design, Scalability and LLM.
Companies (100)
Difficulty
- Easy4% · 13
- Medium56% · 187
- Hard40% · 132
Interview rounds
- Onsite56% · 186
- Technical Screen42% · 138
- Online Assessment2% · 6
- HR Screen1% · 2
Roles
- Machine Learning Engineer54% · 178
- Software Engineer36% · 121
- Applied Scientist4% · 13
- Data Scientist4% · 13
- Member of Technical Staff, ML Systems1% · 2
Frequent concepts
- System Design17% · 56
- ML System Design10% · 32
- Scalability8% · 28
- LLM8% · 26
- RAG8% · 26
- Ranking6% · 20
Most mentioned in interview experiences
- 1.Design a Spam Review Workflow with Classifiers, AI Agents, and Human Labelers2 reports
- 2.Add an LLM-backed recommendation API to an existing service with RAG and prompting1 report
- 3.Applying LLMs to Autonomous Driving Despite Hallucination and Real-Time Limits1 report
- 4.Architect an asynchronous RL post-training system1 report
- 5.Build a Mistral-powered RAG agent1 report
- 6.Build AI chat for spreadsheets1 report
- 7.Choose File Storage Tiers Using Access Predictions1 report
- 8.Compare Single-Agent and Multi-Agent Designs1 report
- 9.Data quality, lineage, monitoring and backfill design for an ML feature store1 report
- 10.Describe model-to-GPU execution pipeline1 report
Counted from 82 candidate interview experiences on Katkat. How we collect and count
Showing 121–150 of 332 results
Design a large-scale music recommendation system combining traditional multi-stage ranking with an LLM agent for natural language intent parsing and contextual explanations.
GoogleSoftware EngineerML System DesignTechnical ScreenThis question evaluates competency in designing large-scale recommendation systems, encompassing machine learning modeling, candidate generation and ranking, data engineering, online serving, feedback-driven learning, evaluation, and experimentation.
GoogleMachine Learning EngineerML System DesignTechnical ScreenDesign a spam review workflow combining classifiers, AI agents, and human labelers with accuracy, throughput, and label-quality evaluation.
GoogleData AnalystML System DesignOnsiteThis question evaluates competency in designing end-to-end machine learning systems for molecular pair regression tasks, including data quality and normalization, molecular representation and feature engineering, model selection, evaluation metrics, uncertainty estimation, and production considerations.
GoogleMachine Learning EngineerML System DesignTechnical ScreenThis question evaluates a candidate's competency in designing large-scale, low-latency real-time recommendation systems, covering feature engineering and feature-store consistency, candidate generation and ranking architectures, cold-start handling, latency versus accuracy trade-offs, monitoring, and operational scalability.
GoogleMachine Learning EngineerML System DesignOnsiteDesign the watch-next recommendations shown while a user watches a video, from objectives and candidate generation to ranking, serving and evaluation. The interview probes modeling depth: exact loss functions for retrieval and multi-task ranking, the gradient at the output logit, and the update rules of the optimizers used to train each model.
GoogleMachine Learning EngineerML System DesignOnsiteDesign an enterprise search agent that provides grounded, cited answers over internal knowledge repositories while strictly enforcing access control lists (ACLs) and handling prompt injection.
GoogleSoftware EngineerML System DesignTechnical ScreenDesign an LLM-powered agent for a manufacturing business that checks production progress, opens work orders and gives customers price quotes. Probes tool design for reads and writes, how to stop the agent from inventing statuses or prices, and how to enforce user permissions outside the model.
GoogleSoftware EngineerML System DesignTechnical ScreenThis question evaluates a candidate's competency in designing end-to-end ML-driven systems that handle large-scale, low-latency OS snapshot ingestion, binary anomaly detection, decisioning and action orchestration with multi-tenant security, auditability, and failure rollback.
GoogleSoftware EngineerML System DesignTechnical ScreenDesign feedback-driven recommender evaluates ML product requirements, data/labeling, modeling, serving architecture, evaluation, monitoring, and trade-offs in a realistic interview setting. A strong answer states assumptions, handles edge cases, explains trade-offs, and shows how to validate the result clearly.
GoogleMachine Learning EngineerML System DesignOnsiteThis question evaluates proficiency in multi-GPU parallelism and system-level ML engineering, covering data partitioning, inter-GPU communication primitives, compute scheduling and overlap, memory layout and buffer reuse, numerical precision trade-offs, synchronization, scalability, and failure handling.
GoogleMachine Learning EngineerML System DesignTechnical ScreenExplain ML model fundamentals evaluates ML product requirements, data/labeling, modeling, serving architecture, evaluation, monitoring, and trade-offs in a realistic interview setting. A strong answer states assumptions, handles edge cases, explains trade-offs, and shows how to validate the result clearly.
GoogleMachine Learning EngineerML System DesignOnsiteDesign and analyze an efficient pipeline parallel training architecture for Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) on large reasoning models. Tests deep understanding of pipeline scheduling, microbatching, distributed advantage normalization, and policy staleness trade-offs.
GoogleMachine Learning EngineerML System DesignTechnical ScreenThis question evaluates a candidate's ability to design ML-driven conversational interfaces and systems integration, emphasizing LLM orchestration, tool schema and API design, authorization and validation, ambiguity handling, atomic multi-step execution, safety against prompt injection, and operational concerns like latency, cost, scaling, and observability. It is commonly asked to assess architectural thinking for integrating language models with controlled tool-calling and safe execution; category: ML System Design; level of abstraction: system-level design requiring both conceptual understanding and practical application.
GrammarlySoftware EngineerML System DesignOnsiteDesign an enterprise-grade retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) service for confidential document vaults. The question tests multi-tenant access control, precise citation provenance, document versioning/freshness, retrieval quality, and hallucination/injection defenses.
HarveySoftware EngineerML System DesignOnsiteThis problem evaluates your ability to design a RAG-based Q&A system for sensitive legal documents, focusing on multi-stage retrieval, hallucination prevention, and data privacy.
HarveySoftware EngineerML System DesignOnsiteDesign an end-to-end Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) system for querying confidential, complex legal memos. This evaluates domain-specific parsing, hybrid retrieval with fine-grained access control, and grounded generation with strict citation fidelity.
HarveySoftware EngineerML System DesignOnsiteDesign an enterprise-grade document evaluation agent that evaluates legal and policy compliance against structured playbooks, producing traceable citations, revision proposals, and tier ratings.
HarveyAI AgentML System DesignOnsiteDesign an LLM agent system that revises a given contract so it complies with several dozen given legal rules. It tests decomposing work across model calls, representing edits so they can be traced and merged, resolving overlapping or conflicting changes, per-rule verification, and cost and latency trade-offs.
HarveySoftware EngineerML System DesignOnsiteDesign a RAG pipeline with document chunking, retrieval recall evaluation, grounded answers, permission-aware context, and versioned index updates.
HarveySoftware EngineerML System DesignOnsiteThis problem tests your ability to design a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) system specialized for financial documents, focusing on multi-agent orchestration, citations, and latency management.
HebbiaSoftware EngineerML System DesignTechnical ScreenThis problem tests your ability to design a complex multi-agent orchestration system that integrates large-scale document retrieval with reliable citation tracking and a user-facing visualization interface.
HebbiaMachine Learning EngineerML System DesignOnsiteThis question tests the ability to architect a robust, scalable, and maintainable synchronous ML inference service, focusing on operational reliability and multi-tenant management.
Hive.AiSoftware EngineerML System DesignTechnical ScreenAdd an LLM-powered recommendation endpoint to an existing backend service. Design the request flow, write the actual prompt and its structured output format, and discuss retrieval-augmented generation, hallucination, prompt injection, and how to evaluate and monitor the feature.
IntuitSoftware EngineerML System DesignOnsiteThis question tests the ability to design an end-to-end recommendation architecture, focusing on the trade-offs between relevance, latency, and data privacy in a financial context.
IntuitSoftware EngineerML System DesignTechnical ScreenThis question tests the ability to design an end-to-end machine learning system that predicts future best-sellers and serves real-time recommendations, balancing model accuracy, batch processing, and serving latency.
IntuitSoftware EngineerML System DesignTechnical ScreenThis problem tests the ability to design an end-to-end RAG system capable of processing both text and image inputs while ensuring high retrieval precision, security, and traceability.
J.P. MorganSoftware Engineer IIML System DesignOnsiteThis question tests the architectural understanding of modern LLM-based application frameworks and the distinctions between modular AI components, task-oriented agents, and multi-agent coordination systems.
J.P. MorganSoftware Engineer IIML System DesignOnsiteDesign an end-to-end training framework evaluates ML product requirements, data/labeling, modeling, serving architecture, evaluation, monitoring, and trade-offs in a realistic interview setting. A strong answer states assumptions, handles edge cases, explains trade-offs, and shows how to validate the result clearly.
Jane StreetMachine Learning EngineerML System DesignTechnical ScreenThis interview question evaluates ML product requirements, data/labeling, modeling, serving architecture, evaluation, monitoring, and trade-offs in a realistic interview setting. A strong answer for Predict future time-series values states assumptions, handles edge cases, explains trade-offs, and shows how to validate the result clearly.
Jane StreetMachine Learning EngineerML System DesignTechnical Screen