recommendation Interview Questions
25 interview questions in our bank cover recommendation, most of them System Design for ML. They average 3.6/5 difficulty — hard — and each one was reported by a candidate after a real interview. Companies known to ask about recommendation: Reddit, Meta, Netflix, Airbnb, StubHub, and 11 more.
Practice these on the problems board →Companies that ask about recommendation
Question mix
- System Design for ML18
- Coding & Leetcode-style Questions5
- ML Fundamentals & Algorithms2
Difficulty
- 3/5 — medium12
- 4/5 — hard12
- 5/5 — very hard1
Questions tagged recommendation
Homepage Video Recommendation System
4/5This architectural system design prompt, commonly featured in Netflix interview loops, focuses on engineering a large-scale streaming recommendation feed for millions of global users. Rather than getting bogged down in individual feature engineering or deep learning layers, you must outline a resilient service-oriented ecosystem, handling high throughput, low-latency scoring pipelines, and effective client communication strategies. It measures your capability to architect production-grade machine learning infrastructure. Explore the complete design guide and expert recommendations by subscribing.
System Design for MLNetflixAirbnb Experiences — Search Ranking (ML Design)
3/5Tackle a practical machine learning system design challenge frequently discussed in Airbnb interviews, focused on building a scalable ranking engine for user activities and listings. This task evaluates your expertise in problem scoping, feature engineering, latency optimization, and offline evaluation metrics tailored for high-traffic platforms. You will learn how to balance business conversion goals with engagement guardrails while meeting strict production latency limits. Gain access to the comprehensive system architecture guide and expert recommendations with a subscription.
ML Fundamentals & AlgorithmsAirbnbShort Video Recommendation & Ranking
4/5This Snapchat machine learning system design question focuses on building a modern short-form video recommendation and ranking platform. It assesses your architectural expertise across candidate retrieval, multi-task ranking, cold-start handling for new items, and capturing short-term user intent signals. Access to the complete system requirements and architectural blueprint requires a subscription.
ML Fundamentals & AlgorithmsSnapchatPost-Comment Ranking System
3/5Designing a scalable comment ranking and discussion tree sorting infrastructure is a prominent machine learning system design question frequently asked at Reddit. This challenge focuses on engineering low-latency retrieval pipelines that surface high-quality user discourse and community posts dynamically without exhaustive re-sorting overhead. You must balance freshness, personalization, and pagination performance under heavy traffic. Gain immediate access to the full problem analysis and architectural solution by subscribing.
System Design for MLRedditAI Coding — Friend Recommendation
3/5This Meta technical assessment centers on debugging and expanding a social network suggestion feature. You will fix filtering flaws in an existing codebase, build a randomized candidate selector, and implement a mutual connection scoring algorithm to retrieve top recommendations. It tests your practical software engineering skills and proficiency in handling collections. Get the comprehensive prompt and verified reference solution with a paid subscription.
Coding & Leetcode-style QuestionsMetaPremium Product Recommendation System
3/5Tackle an advanced machine learning architecture challenge modeled after real-world design rounds at Intuit. You will learn how to construct a scalable suggestion engine capable of delivering personalized commercial content, predicting user intent, and incorporating real-time feedback loops. The assessment focuses heavily on data pipelining, latency reduction, and modern agentic framework integration. View the comprehensive system design blueprint and professional evaluation criteria with a subscription.
System Design for MLIntuitDesign a Composable Event Recommendation Engine for Marketing Campaigns
4/5Reported as a practical interview task from StubHub, this challenge asks you to architect a modular suggestion system tailored for targeted marketing initiatives. You will process multi-faceted criteria involving geographical proximity, pricing thresholds, and temporal relevance to surface appealing happenings to users. This scenario evaluates your system design skills and capability to combine multiple filtering heuristics into a cohesive recommendation pipeline. To view the complete architectural guidelines and implementation blueprint, a subscription is required.
Coding & Leetcode-style QuestionsStubHubHome Page — Search + Availability + Ranking
4/5This senior-level system design prompt, reported from Airbnb, focuses on architecting the core landing page infrastructure with heavy emphasis on low-latency search filtering and machine learning-powered personalized ranking. You will need to address massive scale, high read concurrency, real-time availability checks, and robust feature integration while maintaining strict performance thresholds. Review the complete architectural requirements and comprehensive design blueprint by unlocking a paid subscription.
System Design for MLAirbnbML Modeling: Recommend Games to a User
4/5Design a comprehensive machine learning architecture for digital entertainment discovery, as frequently discussed in Roblox system design loops. This open-ended prompt challenges you to architect an end-to-end recommendation pipeline, addressing data ingestion, feature engineering, candidate filtering, deep ranking models, offline metrics, and online validation. It evaluates your architectural breadth and ability to balance performance, latency, and relevance at scale. Unlock the complete system design framework, architectural diagrams, and expert commentary with a subscription.
System Design for MLRobloxVideo Recommendation
3/5Architecting modern machine learning platforms is a critical competency evaluated during senior technical evaluations at companies like Reddit. This infrastructure challenge tests your ability to design an end-to-end media recommendation pipeline, encompassing candidate retrieval, multi-objective scoring, low-latency serving, and robust feedback collection loops. You will need to address complex data flow logistics, event logging pipelines, and system observability to ensure continuous model improvement. The full problem and model solution require a subscription.
System Design for MLRedditML System Design — Asset / Template Recommendation & Feed
3/5In this machine learning system design interview question reported at Figma, candidates are tasked with architects developing a personalized recommendation feed for digital assets and templates. The discussion typically centers around standard retrieval and scoring architectures, focusing heavily on adapting candidate generation and ranking pipelines to unique creative content. You will need to navigate domain-specific constraints, model trade-offs, and scaling considerations. Unlock the complete breakdown and expert architectural solutions by subscribing today.
System Design for MLFigmaDesign the Uber Eats Search System
5/5Tackle a large-scale machine learning architecture challenge modeled after real-world design rounds at Uber. You will design an intelligent, location-aware food delivery discovery platform that integrates natural language query understanding, hybrid candidate retrieval, strict marketplace filtering, and personalized ranking under strict latency constraints. This scenario tests your ability to unify offline model training pipelines with real-time online inference and feedback logging. Reviewing the complete architectural blueprint and comprehensive solution requires a paid subscription.
System Design for MLUberComment-Prediction ML System
3/5This staff-level machine learning system design exercise, reported from Reddit, challenges candidates to architect a large-scale predictive model that estimates user engagement probabilities for candidate posts within strict latency boundaries. Participants must address complex production hurdles such as handling extreme class imbalance in binary classification, ensuring robust probability calibration for score blending, and engineering real-time features spanning historical user behavior and content embeddings. The complete architectural blueprint and expert reference solution are accessible exclusively with a paid subscription.
System Design for MLRedditML System Design: Dynamic K in Retrieval Stage
4/5This advanced ByteDance machine learning system design question examines your ability to optimize large-scale recommendation pipelines by transitioning from static hyper-parameters to dynamic candidate retrieval sizing. You must formulate optimization strategies that balance computational overhead with downstream ranking quality based on real-time request context and system load. The interview probe evaluates advanced metric formulation and adaptive infrastructure design. Reviewing the complete architectural blueprint, trade-off analysis, and expert model answers requires a paid subscription.
System Design for MLByteDanceMovie Billboard Rotation Service
3/5In this Netflix interview scenario, you are tasked with designing a dynamic recommendation rotation service that serves top-ranking content while preventing consecutive duplicates in user feeds. The challenge tests your ability to maintain sorted state structures, handle dynamic score updates efficiently, and implement fallback logic when preferred options are constrained by repetition rules. It bridges practical API design with algorithmic state management. Unlock the complete problem specifications and production-ready solution by subscribing.
Coding & Leetcode-style QuestionsNetflixProduct Feed and Shopping Recommendation System
3/5This Atlassian system design interview question explores the architecture behind large-scale item recommendation engines, similar to those powering e-commerce platforms or productivity tool feeds. Candidates must address how to efficiently retrieve candidate items, score and rank them using machine learning models, handle user feedback loops, and maintain low latency under heavy traffic. The complete problem statement, architectural framework, and expert-designed solution require a subscription to access.
System Design for MLAtlassianML System Design: Restaurant / Store Recommendation
4/5Tackle a machine learning system design problem featured at DoorDash, focusing on building a scalable architecture that surfaces relevant culinary options to users. This scenario emphasizes infrastructure components like feature stores, retrieval mechanisms, and latency requirements rather than just model training. You will explore how to balance multiple objectives such as user engagement and delivery efficiency under strict performance constraints. Explore the comprehensive design breakdown and expert recommendations with a subscription.
System Design for MLDoorDashOOD: Strategy-Based Event Recommendation Engine
3/5In this object-oriented design question gathered from StubHub interviews, you are asked to architect an extensible event notification system tailored for ticketing platforms. The challenge focuses on applying design patterns to decouple recommendation logic, ensuring that marketing teams can easily introduce new suggestion algorithms without modifying core user data models. It tests architectural foresight, modular design principles, and software maintainability. To examine the comprehensive problem guide and reference class hierarchy, a subscription is required.
Coding & Leetcode-style QuestionsStubHubEnd-to-End ML System Design (Recommendation / Ranking / ETA)
4/5This machine learning system design challenge, frequently featured in interviews at Uber, focuses on architecting scalable end-to-end pipelines for applications like personalized recommendations, feed ranking, and travel time estimation. Candidates must address critical components such as feature engineering, model selection, low-latency online serving, and offline evaluation frameworks. Access to the complete architectural blueprint and expert recommendations requires a paid subscription.
System Design for MLUberRAG Search Augmentation and Internal Chatbot
3/5Designed around real-world scenarios at Atlassian, this machine learning architecture challenge focuses on building an intelligent internal discovery platform that parses employee queries, extracts intent, and retrieves contextual enterprise data. It evaluates your skills in designing retrieval-augmented generation pipelines and search systems at scale. Access the comprehensive architectural breakdown and expert recommendations with a subscription.
System Design for MLAtlassianLearning / Job Recommendation Ranking
4/5In this advanced machine learning system design challenge inspired by LinkedIn interviews, you are tasked with architecting a low-latency recommendation engine that personalizes professional content while providing transparent explanations for every suggestion. It evaluates your expertise in feature engineering, candidate generation, and ranking models at scale. Get full access to the complete system architecture blueprint and design guide with a subscription.
System Design for MLLinkedInDesign a Nearby-Place Recommender (Location-Aware)
4/5Tackle this Meta system design interview scenario centered on building a location-aware recommendation engine that suggests nearby points of interest and marketplace listings in real time. The discussion dives deep into spatial indexing, multi-stage ranking pipelines, and engineering features capable of adapting to rapid geolocation changes on mobile devices. Interviewers heavily emphasize evaluation metrics and feature engineering over raw architecture. Unlock the comprehensive breakdown and expert design patterns by subscribing.
System Design for MLMetaML System Design: Search & Ranking
4/5Master large-scale machine learning architecture design with this comprehensive system design prompt featured at Pinterest. Candidates are challenged to architect end-to-end recommendation and retrieval pipelines, balancing candidate generation stages with sophisticated ranking models, loss function selection, and latency constraints. This scenario tests your ability to scale modern discovery engines, handle real-time engagement data, and design effective offline evaluation metrics. Unlock the full system design framework, architectural diagrams, and expert commentary with a subscription.
System Design for MLPinterestDesign a Reels Short-Video Recommender
4/5Reported as a Meta system design interview, this challenge centers on building a massive short-video recommendation pipeline focused on user engagement metrics. You will design a multi-stage architecture covering retrieval, filtering, scoring, and diversity re-ranking, while emphasizing metric evaluation and experimentation strategies. Success in this area relies heavily on balancing advanced machine learning features with scalable system performance. Unlock the full architectural breakdown and model response by subscribing.
System Design for MLMetaTop-K Co-Occurring Products in Sessions (Recommendation by Frequency)
3/5This eBay interview question asks you to analyze user browsing session data to find the most frequently co-occurring products alongside a specific target item. The puzzle evaluates your data aggregation and frequency counting skills, requiring careful session-level deduplication to identify top recommendations based on user navigation patterns. To review the comprehensive problem description, edge-case handling strategies, and fully tested model solution, a subscription is necessary.
Coding & Leetcode-style QuestionseBay
Studied alongside
recommendation interview FAQ
- How many recommendation interview questions are there?
- 25 reported questions, mostly System Design for ML.
- Which companies ask recommendation questions?
- Reddit (3), Meta (3), Netflix (2), Airbnb (2), StubHub (2), Uber (2), Atlassian (2), Snapchat (1).
- How hard are recommendation questions?
- They average 3.6 out of 5: 12 at 3/5, 12 at 4/5, 1 at 5/5.