System design
Eight problems that cover most GenAI design rounds. Do one a day, out loud, against the clock.
45:00
45 minutes in five phases. Talk out loud the whole time.
Answer in this order
Clarify requirementsUsers, scale, latency, accuracy bar, data and compliance.
Define successA business metric, a quality metric, and NFRs with numbers.
Draw the architectureBoxes and data flow, left to right, before any detail.
Choose modelsWhich model for each step, and why.
Data and retrievalIngestion, indexing, access control and freshness.
EvaluationGolden set, offline gates and online monitoring.
Safety and securityGuardrails, injection, PII and tool permissions.
Cost and latencyBudget math, caching, routing and streaming.
Scale and failureWhat breaks first, the fallbacks, and how you’d know.
Problems
Enterprise RAG over 10 million documentsAccess control at scaleMulti-agent customer supportActions, handoff and safetyMulti-tenant LLM gatewayYour strongest topicFinancial document intelligenceExtraction with human reviewCode-review agentSignal over noiseMove from API models to self-hostedCost, control and qualityEvaluation platform for 20 LLM appsQuality at company scaleAgentic workflow with human approvalLong-running and auditable