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Design Feature Drift Monitoring System

HardSystem Design00:00
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Problem

Scenario

You are supporting a production ML ranking system for a high-traffic digital platform where model quality directly affects revenue and user engagement. The system uses a mix of real-time and batch features from user behavior, item metadata, and contextual signals, and the team has seen silent regressions caused by upstream schema changes and shifting user behavior. You have been asked to design an end-to-end approach for detecting, diagnosing, and responding to feature drift before it materially harms model performance. The solution should work for both fast-changing online features and slower batch-computed features.

Scale

SignalValue
DAU18M
Peak prediction QPS120K
Ranked items per request150
Total model features650
Real-time features220
Batch features430
Feature freshness SLAreal-time < 5 min; batch < 24 hr
p99 inference latency budget120 ms
Training data retained90 days

Question

How would you design the production ML system so feature drift monitoring is a first-class part of the end-to-end architecture, including how data is generated, served, evaluated, alerted on, and used to trigger mitigation or rollback decisions?