AI System Design - performance
#01 Data Engineering

Build a Chunking and Embedding Pipeline for 100M Documents Premium

A blueprint for a backfill-and-incremental pipeline that chunks, deduplicates, and embeds 100 million documents into 420 million vectors, sustaining 1,000 embeddings per second during backfill and a 15 minute freshness SLA in steady state.

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#02 Data Engineering

Build a Citation Tracing System for RAG Responses Premium

Design a citation tracing system that maps every sentence of a RAG answer back to its source chunk across 50M documents, holding 95% attribution accuracy at under 200ms added latency.

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#03 Performance

Build a Continuous Batching Server for High-Throughput LLM Inference Premium

Design a continuous batching server that dynamically admits and evicts sequences mid-generation, sustaining 8,000+ tokens per second across 128 concurrent requests on 4xA100 GPUs while keeping p99 time-to-first-token under 200ms.

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#04 Data Engineering

Build a Conversational Memory Store for Long-Running RAG Sessions Premium

Design a tiered memory store that keeps 30 million active sessions coherent across 400-turn conversations, packing the right 8,000 tokens of history into every prompt while holding p99 memory retrieval under 40ms.

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#05 Performance

Build a Disaggregated Prefill-Decode Inference Architecture Premium

Design a disaggregated prefill-decode inference architecture that separates compute-bound prefill from memory-bound decode across dedicated GPU pools, sustaining 12,000 decode tokens per second at sub-150ms TTFT while cutting GPU-hours 35% versus co-located serving.

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#06 Data Engineering

Build a Document Freshness and Re-Embedding Pipeline Premium

Design a pipeline that tracks change across 50 million indexed documents and re-embeds 2 million of them per day, keeping p99 index staleness under 15 minutes without a full reindex.

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#07 Databases

Build a Knowledge Graph-Augmented RAG System Premium

A blueprint for augmenting RAG with a property graph of 5 million entities and 40 million relationships extracted from 2 million documents, fusing graph traversal with vector search to answer multi-hop questions at 200 requests/second under a 400ms p99 retrieval budget.

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#08 Caching

Build a KV-Cache Sharing Layer for Multi-Turn LLM Conversations Premium

Design a distributed KV-cache sharing layer that eliminates redundant prefill computation for 50,000 concurrent multi-turn conversations, cutting time-to-first-token from 800ms to under 80ms with 70% GPU memory savings on prefix reuse.

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#09 Performance

Build a Model Sharding System for Serving 70B+ Parameter Models Premium

Design a model sharding system that splits a 70B-parameter model's 140GB of FP16 weights across 8 A100 GPUs using tensor and pipeline parallelism, sustaining 40 tokens/s per replica with under 20GB of KV cache headroom per shard.

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#10 Data Engineering

Build a Multi-Hop RAG System for Complex Question Answering Premium

A blueprint for a multi-hop RAG system that decomposes complex questions into a dependency-ordered sub-question DAG, retrieves and re-ranks evidence per hop, and synthesizes a cited answer across 3 million documents at 150 requests per second under a 3.5 second p99 budget.

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