Design Analytics Infrastructure for IoT devices
Last updated: November 6, 2025
Quick Overview
Design a real-time analytics system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Airbnb
System Design
Software Engineer
Airbnb
November 6, 2025Software Engineer
Technical Screen
System Design
Medium
4
12
4,590 solved
Design a real-time analytics system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
ML system design at Airbnb 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
A/B testing and experimentation
Online vs offline evaluation
Data collection and labeling strategy
Model selection and architecture
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 run A/B tests on different model versions?
- How would you handle a 10x increase in prediction requests?
- How would you handle the cold start problem?
- How would you debug a model that works well offline but poorly online?
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Requirements
Functional Requirements
- Real-time Data Ingestion: The system must process incoming data from millions of IoT devices in real-time, capturing metrics such as temperature, humidity, and occup...
Capacity Estimation
Back-of-Envelope Calculations
Assuming each IoT device sends data every second:
- Devices: 10 million IoT devices
- Requests per Device: 1 request/second
- Total Requests: 10 million r...
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