Design Search Infrastructure for mobile apps
Last updated: July 24, 2025
Quick Overview
Design a event-driven search system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
HRT
System Design
Software Engineer
HRT
July 24, 2025Software Engineer
System Design Round
System Design
Easy
46
6
2,433 solved
Design a event-driven search system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
ML system design at HRT goes beyond model selection. This System Design Round 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
- Map the business problem to a concrete ML objective
- Propose reasonable features and a baseline model
- Discuss basic model evaluation metrics
- Outline a simple serving architecture
Key Topics to Cover
ML objective formulation and metric selection
Data collection and labeling strategy
Feedback loops and model retraining
Model serving and latency optimization
Feature engineering and feature stores
A/B testing and experimentation
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 handle a 10x increase in prediction requests?
- How would you run A/B tests on different model versions?
- How would you ensure fairness and reduce bias in the model?
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Requirements
Functional Requirements
- Search Functionality: Allow users to search for events (e.g., concerts, sports) by keywords, location, and date.
- Autocomplete Suggestions: Provide real-time s...
Capacity Estimation
Assuming the following:
- Daily Users: 10 million unique users.
- Search Requests: Each user performs an average of 5 searches per day.
- Peak Load: 20% of requests occur during peak hours...
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