Code RoomDesign in-session personalization at scale
HardPrep Room Coding #3230

Design in-session personalization at scale

System designML systemsDistributed systemsSenior–Staff~45 min

Design a real-time personalization system that adapts within a single browsing session: as a user clicks/scrolls/adds-to-cart over a few minutes, their recommendations should reflect that just-now intent (e.g. they switched from browsing shoes to looking for a gift), not just their long-term history. This must work for 100M users with sub-100ms recommendation latency. Design how in-session signals are captured, turned into features, and incorporated into ranking fast enough to feel live — and the trade-off vs batch-trained models.

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.

Clarify5:00 left
Estimate5:00 planned
Design15:00 planned
Deep dive12:00 planned
Failure8:00 planned
0:00
Which questions mattered is sealed until you submit. Telling you now would just be handing over the edge cases.