Code RoomAd ranking inference latency
MediumPrep Room Coding #3226

Ad ranking inference latency

System designML systemsDistributed systemsMid–Senior~40 min

Design the real-time ad ranking service that scores candidate ads for each ad slot on a social feed. For every impression it must fetch dozens of features (user features, ad features, context) from multiple stores, run a ranking model over ~500 candidate ads, and return the winner within a 30ms budget — at 1M requests/second. A slow or failed feature store call cannot be allowed to blow the latency budget or drop the whole request. Design the inference service with its feature-fetch fan-out and degradation strategy.

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.

Clarify4:30 left
Estimate4:30 planned
Design13:30 planned
Deep dive10:30 planned
Failure7:00 planned
0:00
Which questions mattered is sealed until you submit. Telling you now would just be handing over the edge cases.