Lambda·Software Engineer·Onsite - System Design / Architecture
Jun 2026
Lambda system design round for a software engineer role. The whole interview was basically one giant question about building an AI inference platform, and it went in a lot of directions fast.
- Design a cloud-based AI inference platform that handles both real-time and batch workloads. Walk through model packaging and versioning, hardware selection, autoscaling, request routing, and multi-tenant isolation.
- How would you handle latency and throughput targets for the platform, and what cost control mechanisms would you put in place, like right-sizing or spot instance usage?
- What observability would you build into this platform, specifically around tracing and metrics for inference requests?
- How would you safely roll out new model versions, and what strategies would you use to catch regressions before full deployment?
- How would you integrate this platform with Kubernetes and a model registry, and how does your design compare to existing industry solutions?
“This is a beast of a question and I spent probably too long on the hardware selection piece.”