#embeddings

17 embeddings interview questions, asked at Airbnb, Apple, Google and 15 more companies. Last asked Sep 2026.

Design a work-together distance between two employeesML designDesign a distance d(u1, u2) between any two people in a company that measures how closely they work together: smaller means closer. Decide which signals to use (shared documents…
Last asked Sep 2026
Embedding retrieval with cosine similarityCodingRetrieve the most similar embeddings to a query by cosine similarity over a small candidate set. Reported on 1point3acres' Harvey bank; reconstructed in our own words.
Last asked Sep 2026
+1
ML design for retrieval: embeddings, hybrid search and rankingML designDesign the machine learning behind the retrieval stage of a question-answering system. Discuss how you train the embedding model, how retrieval combines dense and keyword search…
Last asked Sep 2026
Predict click-through rate for music recommendationsML designDesign a model that predicts whether a user will click a recommended song. Explain how you would embed songs, how you handle the different kinds of features, and how you would…
Last asked Sep 2026
Design a pipeline around embedding and classification servicesML designYou have two services, one that embeds items and one that classifies them. Design the API and the pipeline that uses them to process incoming data: how requests flow, batching…
Last asked Jul 2026
Build a RAG agent on the Mistral API, then defend its designAI system designWrite a small Python tool that answers questions over a local folder of Markdown and PDF files with retrieval-augmented generation: ingest and chunk the files, embed and index the…
Last asked Jul 2026
Mine new information from a huge unlabeled image corpusML designYou have a very large corpus of unlabeled images. Design a system that surfaces examples unlike anything already in the training data, and that finds the images containing a given…
Last asked May 2026
Design candidate search for a talent marketplaceML designDesign a system that lets a company search for candidates and ranks them for a role: how candidate profiles are represented and indexed, how a query or job description retrieves…
Last asked May 2026
Semantic search with user embeddingsML designDesign search that uses embeddings of users together with embeddings of listings, so results match both the request and the person searching. Cover how the user and item…
Last asked Apr 2026
+5
Design a feed recommendation systemML designRank the items in each user's home feed so they engage more, choosing from millions of candidates within a couple of hundred milliseconds.
Last asked Apr 2026
+5
Design a RAG system over company docsAI system designEmployees should be able to ask questions about internal documents (Drive, Confluence, Slack, GitHub) and get grounded answers with citations.
Last asked Mar 2026
Shard a large input embedding table across devicesML designA model's V, H input embedding table is too big for one device. Compare sharding along the vocabulary with sharding along the hidden dimension: how a lookup works in each, the…
Last asked Jan 2026
Design near-duplicate video detection at scaleSystem designDetect when an uploaded video is a near copy of one already on a very large platform (re-encoded, cropped, trimmed). Cover how videos are fingerprinted or embedded, how candidates…
Last asked Jan 2026
Classify a stream of tokens with embeddingsML designGiven data that arrives as a stream, process the tokens online, turn them into embeddings, and build a model that classifies them. Cover how you process data as it arrives, which…
Last asked Jan 2026
Design a video search systemML designDesign search over a large video library: a user types a query and gets the most relevant videos. Cover both the models (how videos and queries are embedded, how frames and text…
Last asked Aug 2025
Design a retrieval-augmented generation systemAI system designDesign a RAG system: users ask questions and an LLM answers using documents retrieved from your corpus. Cover ingestion and chunking, embeddings and the index, retrieval and…
Last asked Aug 2025
Design a duplicate listing detection systemML designFind hosts who relist the same property under a new listing (to shed bad reviews or evade bans), using text, photos, location and host signals.