Architecture and Technical Trade Offs Questions

Centers on system and solution design decisions and the trade offs inherent in architecture choices. Candidates should be able to identify alternatives, clarify constraints such as scale cost and team capability, and articulate trade offs like consistency versus availability, latency versus throughput, simplicity versus extensibility, monolith versus microservices, synchronous versus asynchronous patterns, database selection, caching strategies, and operational complexity. This topic covers methods for quantifying or qualitatively evaluating impacts, prototyping and measuring performance, planning incremental migrations, documenting decisions, and proposing mitigation and monitoring plans to manage risk and maintainability.

MediumTechnical

0 practiced

Discuss the practical trade-offs of using an eventually consistent feature store (e.g., stream-updated store with lag) versus a strongly consistent store for online features. How would each choice affect model correctness, freshness, latency, and serving-layer complexity? Suggest patterns to mitigate eventual-consistency pitfalls.

HardTechnical

0 practiced

Debate centralized versus decentralized governance for feature and model versioning: a central metadata service that enforces versions and contracts versus delegating versioning to individual services. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, developer velocity, operational overhead, and approaches to enforce contracts and safe migrations at scale.

MediumTechnical

0 practiced

You're considering model distillation to reduce inference latency at a small accuracy cost. Design an experiment to quantify latency vs accuracy trade-offs between teacher and student models. Include metrics, required sample sizes, A/B test design for production validation, and how to safely roll out distilled models.

HardTechnical

0 practiced

As a Staff Machine Learning Engineer, you're asked to deliver a low-latency, globally distributed personalization system in 3 months with minimal budget and a small team. How would you push back constructively, propose pragmatic alternatives, prioritize scope, and document trade-offs to stakeholders? Provide a concrete step-by-step approach including minimal viable architecture, staging plan, and communication strategy.

EasyTechnical

0 practiced

Your company is starting to deploy several ML models alongside a core web app. Explain the pros and cons of growing the system as a monolith versus extracting separate microservices for each model. Discuss deploy velocity, operational complexity, testing, latency, cross-team ownership, and how team size/skillset influences the decision.

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