Architect a real-time Load Balancing Engine
Last updated: February 9, 2026
Quick Overview
Design a real-time load balancing system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Meta
February 9, 2026362
6
547 solved
Design a real-time load balancing system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
ML system design at Meta goes beyond model selection. This Technical Screen question evaluates your ability to design end-to-end ML pipelines, from data collection to model serving, while considering production constraints like latency and reliability.
What the Interviewer Expects
- Define clear ML objectives with appropriate loss functions and metrics
- Design a comprehensive feature engineering pipeline
- Discuss model selection with trade-offs (complexity vs interpretability vs latency)
- Plan online and offline evaluation strategies including A/B testing
- Address serving infrastructure: batch vs real-time, latency requirements
- Consider data quality, labeling strategy, and feedback loops
Key Topics to Cover
How to Approach This
- Start by clarifying functional and non-functional requirements with the interviewer.
- Estimate the scale: QPS, storage, bandwidth. This drives your design decisions.
- Draw a high-level architecture first, then deep dive into 1-2 critical components.
- Discuss trade-offs explicitly (e.g., consistency vs availability, SQL vs NoSQL).
- Address failure scenarios, monitoring, and how the system handles 10x traffic spikes.
Possible Follow-up Questions
- How would you ensure fairness and reduce bias in the model?
- What would you do if model performance degrades over time?
- How would you handle the cold start problem?
- What is your model retraining strategy?
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Requirements
Functional Requirements:
- Real-time Load Balancing: The system must distribute incoming requests across multiple servers based on current load and performance metrics.
- **Dynamic Adjustmen...
Capacity Estimation
Assuming Meta handles approximately 1 billion requests per day, which translates to about 11,574 requests per second (RPS). With a target of handling peak loads, let's consider a 5x peak multiplier, r...
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