17 retrieval interview questions, asked at Databricks, Harvey, Amazon and 11 more companies. Last asked Sep 2026.
RAG notebook with retrieval and evaluationCodingIn a notebook with helpers provided, fill in a small retrieval pipeline: embed texts from a data frame, retrieve top matches by cosine similarity, and run a short evaluation…
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
Retrieve tables and notebooks for a data-aware coding agentAI system designAn internal coding agent helps employees write code and answer questions. When someone asks a data question, such as how a metric changed over some period, the agent first has to…
Last asked Sep 2026
Design retrieval for a coding agent over a code baseAI system designA coding agent is an LLM assistant that works inside a software code base: it reads code, answers questions about it and makes edits. It depends on retrieval to put the right code…
Last asked Sep 2026
Components of an LLM agent's memoryML designName the common components of an LLM agent's memory (for example the context window, a short-term scratchpad or conversation buffer, long-term stores of facts and past episodes…
Last asked Sep 2026
Design a RAG question-answering agent over a firm's documentsAI system designDesign a system that answers questions from a large, private collection of documents (for example a law firm's memos) with retrieval-augmented generation, citing the passages it…
Last asked Sep 2026
Design an LLM-based coding assistantAI system designDesign an AI coding assistant that helps developers inside their editor: completing code, answering questions about a codebase and making edits on request. Discuss how it gathers…
Last asked Jun 2026
Design a recommender for local sports teams and newsML designRecommend local sports teams, and the news about them, to each user. Discuss what data you collect and how it is produced, what you know about the user (location, follows…
Last asked Jun 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
Build a recommender, then a chatbot on top of itAI system design1. Build a recommendation system from scratch: data, candidate generation, ranking, evaluation and serving. 2. Now that it exists, build a conversational interface on top of it…
Last asked Jan 2026
Design app store searchML designDesign search for an app store: the user types a query and gets a ranked list of apps. Cover query understanding (spelling, intent), retrieval, ranking features and models…
Last asked Dec 2025
Improve a chatbot's answers to questions it doesn't knowAI system designUsers ask a ChatGPT-style assistant questions it does not know the answer to. Design how the system notices these questions and gives better answers to them: what it does instead…
Last asked Dec 2025
Design a logo infringement detection systemML designDesign a machine-learning system that finds listings or images that misuse a brand's logo. Cover how brands register their logos, how you detect and match logos in new images at…
Last asked Nov 2025
Design a RAG system end to endAI system designDesign a retrieval-augmented generation system from documents to answers: ingesting and chunking documents, embeddings and the index, retrieval and reranking, the prompt to the…
Last asked Sep 2025
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…