Code Room
System designHardsd-g357
Subject Model monitoringLevel Senior–Staff~45 minCommon in Reliability & on-call interviewsIndustries Technology, Software development

Question

Design a drift-detection and auto-retrain trigger system for a demand-forecasting model that drives inventory/staffing across thousands of stores. The model can silently degrade when the world shifts (a holiday, a new product line, a competitor opening). You want to detect when predictions have drifted from reality and automatically kick off a retrain — but a false trigger wastes money and a flapping loop is dangerous. Walk through what signals you monitor (input drift vs output drift vs realized error), how you decide a retrain is warranted, and how the trigger safely hands off to the training pipeline without thrashing.

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.

Narrate your design
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Run or narrate your approach, then ask the coach.