System designHardsd-g076

Subject RelevanceLevel Senior–Staff~55 minCommon in ML systems interviewsIndustries Technology

Question

Design enterprise search across a company's internal docs, wikis, chat, and tickets (10k employees, ~500M documents). Queries are natural-language ('how do I expense a conference') and must return the right doc even with no keyword overlap. Constraints: strict per-document ACLs, p95 under 400ms, and freshness within minutes of a doc edit.

What a strong answer looks like

Clarify scale and constraints first. Propose a clean component breakdown, then go deep on the hard parts — data model, bottlenecks, consistency, failure modes — and name the trade-offs you are making.

Learn the concepts

Narrate your design

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Run or narrate your approach, then ask the coach.