Design Prime Video
Last updated: July 13, 2025
Quick Overview
Design the architecture for Prime Video. Cover scalability, data storage, caching, and real-time requirements.
Amazon
System Design
Software Engineer
Amazon
July 13, 2025Software Engineer
Onsite
System Design
Medium
183
7
4,902 solved
Design the architecture for Prime Video. Cover scalability, data storage, caching, and real-time requirements.
Amazon asks this during the Onsite to assess your understanding of the full ML lifecycle. They want to see how you translate a business problem into an ML objective, design the feature pipeline, and plan for model monitoring and retraining.
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
Feature engineering and feature stores
Model serving and latency optimization
ML objective formulation and metric selection
Training pipeline and infrastructure
Online vs offline evaluation
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 the cold start problem?
- How would you debug a model that works well offline but poorly online?
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Requirements
Functional Requirements
- User Authentication: Allow users to log in using their Amazon accounts.
- Content Catalog: Display a catalog of movies and shows, including genres, descriptions...
Capacity Estimation
Assuming Prime Video has approximately 150 million subscribers, and each user streams about 2 hours of content per week:
- Total Streaming Hours per Week: 150 million users * 2 hours = 300 million...
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