Code Room
System designHardsd-p066
Subject Search indexingLevel Senior–Staff~45 minCommon in Databases & SQL interviewsIndustries Technology

Question

Design a semantic search / retrieval layer that, given a query embedding, returns the most similar items from hundreds of millions of vectors in milliseconds.

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
Loading whiteboard…
Run or narrate your approach, then ask the coach.