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Design a feed app similar to Twitter

HardSystem Design00:00
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Your question is Design a feed app similar to Twitter. Take a moment with it on the right.

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Problem

Design a feed app similar to Twitter

This practical interview question asks you to design the end-to-end ML system that selects and orders posts in a personalized feed. The prompt does not specify product scale, so clarify assumptions before designing.

Address:

  1. Functional goals, engagement objectives, and safety or diversity constraints.
  2. Traffic, catalog, candidate volume, storage, and latency estimates.
  3. Candidate generation, ranking, and any re-ranking stages.
  4. Online serving, batch processing, feature storage, and fallbacks.
  5. Offline and online evaluation, including experiment guardrails.
  6. Training-serving skew, feature drift, cold start, and monitoring.

Keep the design practical and explain tradeoffs between relevance, freshness, cost, and latency.