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System Design in Coding Questions

Assess the ability to apply system design thinking while solving coding problems. Candidates should demonstrate how implementation level choices relate to overall architecture and production concerns. This includes designing lightweight data pipelines or data models as part of a coding solution, reasoning about algorithmic complexity, throughput, and memory use at scale, and explaining trade offs between different algorithms and data structures. Candidates should discuss bottlenecks and pragmatic mitigations such as caching strategies, database selection and schema design, indexing, partitioning, and asynchronous processing, and explain how components integrate into larger systems. They should be able to describe how they would implement parts of a design, justify code level trade offs, and consider deployment, monitoring, and reliability implications. Demonstrating this mindset shows the candidate is thinking beyond a single function and can balance correctness, performance, maintainability, and operational considerations.

HardTechnical
74 practiced
A production model's P95 prediction latency has grown gradually over the past month. Design a debugging and remediation plan that covers code, infrastructure, and data sources. Include steps to collect diagnostic telemetry, narrow the root cause, temporary mitigations to restore SLAs, and long-term fixes to prevent recurrence.
MediumSystem Design
67 practiced
Design a distributed cache for model artifacts to speed up model loading across 1,000 nodes with 10,000 model loads/day. Constraints: limited network bandwidth, cache hit latency under 20ms, and eviction under memory limits. Discuss metadata, consistency, lease/TLS considerations, and how to invalidate or rollout new model versions.
HardSystem Design
75 practiced
Design an ingestion path for real-time feature updates from millions of edge devices to an online feature store. Requirements: preserve ordering per device, deduplicate updates, handle intermittent connectivity and bursts, provide at-least-once delivery, and limit backend write amplification. Outline protocols and buffering/backpressure mechanisms.
MediumTechnical
70 practiced
You have variable-sized inputs for a GPU-backed model and limited GPU memory. Describe a batching algorithm (heuristic or formal) that maximizes throughput while minimizing out-of-memory (OOM) errors. Explain how you would implement it in code and what runtime signals you would use to adapt the batcher dynamically.
EasyTechnical
77 practiced
Explain why idempotency matters for prediction APIs and design an idempotency key strategy for a model inference service that may receive client retries. Include how keys are generated, stored, TTL considerations, and how to prevent unbounded storage growth.

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