How Together AI Interviews Backend and Infra Engineers
7 min read A walk through Together AI’s engineering loop, from the coding rounds to GPU-serving system design and the CUDA-flavored take-homes. Read article
Interview Prep
System Design
Design Google Docs: Collaborative Editing and CRDTs
5 min read Design a real-time collaborative document editor like Google Docs. This is one of the most technically nuanced system design problems Read article
System Design
Design a Recommendation Engine (Netflix-style)
5 min read Design a recommendation engine like Netflix’s, Spotify’s Discover Weekly, or Amazon’s “Customers also bought.” Recommendation systems are one of the Read article
System Design
Design an LLM Inference API
6 min read Design an LLM inference API — the service that accepts user prompts and returns model completions, like the OpenAI API, Read article
System Design
Design an Ad Click Aggregation System
5 min read Design an ad click aggregation system — the infrastructure that counts how many times each ad was clicked, detects fraud, Read article
System Design
Design a Monitoring and Alerting System
6 min read Design a monitoring and alerting system like Datadog, Prometheus + Grafana, or New Relic. This is a system design problem Read article
System Design
Design a Stock Trading Platform
5 min read Design a stock trading platform like NYSE, Nasdaq, or a brokerage like Robinhood. This problem is notable for its extreme Read article
System Design
Design a CDN (Content Delivery Network)
6 min read Design a Content Delivery Network like Cloudflare, Akamai, or AWS CloudFront. A CDN is infrastructure that most large-scale systems depend Read article
System Design
Design a Distributed ID Generator (Snowflake)
4 min read Design a distributed ID generation service. Every large-scale system needs unique IDs — for database rows, events, messages, and transactions. Read article
System Design
Design Google Maps / Navigation System
6 min read Design a navigation system like Google Maps. This problem combines geospatial data at scale, graph algorithms, real-time data ingestion, and Read article
System Design
Design a Hotel / Airbnb Reservation System
5 min read Design a hotel or vacation rental reservation system like Booking.com or Airbnb. The core challenge isn’t the search UI — Read article
System Design
Design a Proximity Service (Yelp / Nearby Search)
5 min read Design a proximity service like Yelp’s “restaurants near me” or Google Maps’ nearby search. The core challenge is geospatial indexing Read article
System Design
Design a Payment System
5 min read Design a payment system like Stripe, PayPal, or an internal payments platform at a company like Uber or Amazon. This Read article
System Design
Design a Distributed Key-Value Store
5 min read Design a distributed key-value store like DynamoDB, Cassandra (its KV layer), or Redis Cluster. This is one of the most Read article
System Design
Design a News Feed (Facebook-style)
4 min read Design a news feed system like Facebook’s. This is a richer problem than the Twitter feed design — Facebook’s feed Read article