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Google·Machine Learning Engineer·Onsite - System Design / Architecture·Senior

SeniorPrefer not to say
Jul 2026

Summary

Google ML Engineer system design round focused entirely on building a recommendation system from scratch, covering pretty much every angle you can imagine. It was one of the more exhaustive design questions I've sat through, the kind where you realize halfway in that you've been talking for 20 minutes and still haven't touched ranking.

Questions Asked (1)

Q1

Design a recommendation system for a large consumer platform that supports both e-commerce product feeds and video media feeds.

System DesignTechnical Trade-offsA/B Testing & Experimentation
Author's notes

This is a monster of a question.

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AI HintsAI Generated

Suggested Approach

Start by clarifying requirements and scale, then propose a unified two-tower architecture with shared embeddings and separate towers for e-commerce and video feeds. Discuss how to handle different objectives (CTR vs. watch time) and how to evaluate with online A/B tests.

Pro tip: Emphasize the importance of a shared embedding space and multi-task learning to leverage cross-domain signals, but also highlight the need for domain-specific fine-tuning and separate evaluation metrics.

1. Clarify Requirements and Scale

Ask about scale (users, items, videos), latency constraints, and business objectives (e.g., revenue, engagement). Confirm whether the system should be unified or separate for each feed.

2. Propose High-Level Architecture

Outline a two-stage system: candidate generation (e.g., two-tower model) and ranking (e.g., deep neural network). Discuss how to share components across e-commerce and video while allowing domain-specific features.

3. Detail Modeling Approach

Explain how to handle multiple objectives (e.g., CTR, watch time, purchase) using multi-task learning. Describe feature engineering, embedding sharing, and handling cold-start.

4. Discuss Evaluation and Experimentation

Describe offline metrics (e.g., recall@k, NDCG) and online A/B testing methodology. Highlight the need for guardrail metrics and long-term holdbacks.

5. Address Trade-offs and Scalability

Discuss trade-offs between model complexity and latency, and how to scale training and serving (e.g., distributed training, model compression).

Key Points to Mention

  • Two-tower architecture for candidate generation with shared embeddings
  • Multi-task learning to optimize for different objectives (CTR, watch time, purchase)
  • Handling cold-start and exploration vs. exploitation
  • Online A/B testing with guardrail metrics and long-term holdbacks
  • Scalability considerations: distributed training, low-latency serving
  • Cross-domain signal transfer and domain-specific fine-tuning

AI-generated suggestions, not part of the candidate's original notes. May be inaccurate — verify before relying on them.