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ML System Design in a Hurry
Evaluation
Evaluations for important patterns of ML system designs, built by FAANG managers and staff engineers.
Every ML system design problem will require some sort of evaluation. Evaluations are part of the optimization loop, and showcasing your ability to evaluate (and by proxy, improve) ML systems is a key part of the interview process. The hard part is that most engineers aren't working on production systems of every variant: so if you've been working on time series forecasting and are asked in an interview about how classification systems are evaluated, you're at a disadvantage.
In this guide, we're going first walk through a general evaluation framework which you can use for any ML system design problem. Then we'll talk through the evaluation challenges for popular types of ML systems seen in interviews and discuss metrics and techniques you can use for them. The goal here is to establish breadth necessary to be ready for most interview questions, with references to build up your depth.
General Evaluation Framework for Interviews
Most production ML systems are not trivial to evaluate. There may be subjectivity at play, feedback loops may be long, and there may be many pieces of the system working in concert. As such, when you approach an evaluation challenge you'll want to be structured in how you approach it. We recommend this structure:
- Business Objective: We'll start with the business objective. If you're following our delivery framework, the business objective will be top of mind. Working backwards from this objective will ensure your metric is tethered to something real and valuable, not an arbitrary vanity evaluation.
- Product Metrics: Next we'll work up to the product metrics: explain which user-facing metrics will indicate success. Think about what you can measure in the performance of the product or system which will indicate success.
- ML metrics: With product metrics in place, we can detail technical metrics that align with the product goals. These should be metrics you can measure in the performance of the ML system, often without requiring new inputs (labels, user feedback, simulation results, etc.)
- Evaluation Methodology: With our metrics in place, we'll discuss how we can measure them. Outline both online and offline evaluation approaches. Oftentimes your offline evaluations will be a proxy for the online evaluation, but geared towards rapid iteration.
- Address Challenges: Finally, your evaluation will invariably include some challenges. Imbalanced data, labelling costs, fairness issues, etc. You'll finalize the evaluation discussion by discussing potential pitfalls and how you'd mitigate them.
Evaluation Steps
We'll talk through each of these steps with examples below. Remember that the work of an ML engineer is primarily focused on facilitating an optimization: demonstrating your ability to show you can work at each layer of the evaluation "stack" will show your interviewer you're ready to optimize real production systems.
Classification Systems
In classification systems, we're taking some input (e.g. an image and some text) and we're predicting some output (e.g. a classification label). Classification systems will often have a labelling component with non-trivial cost, so an important consideration is how resource-efficient you can be in conducting these evaluations. They also frequently "fill in" for humans doing manual work, which provides good baselines for thresholds and clues to the right metrics to use to evaluate.
Example problems: Content moderation, spam detection, fraud detection
Business Objective
For classification systems, the business objective will often be downstream of the classification. Ask yourself "what action is taken as a result of the classification?" and "how does that action impact the business?" For example, in a content moderation system, the primary business goal is minimizing harmful content exposure while avoiding false positives that might frustrate legitimate users. This impacts user retention and operational review costs.
Product Metrics
Product metrics will vary wildly by application, but some common ones include:
- User retention rate
- Time to label (moderate/evaluate/judge/etc)
- User satisfaction scores
- Operational review costs
- Appeal rate for moderation decisions
- Downstream costs associated with errors (both false-positives and false-negatives)
ML Metrics
For measuring classification systems, it's common to use the language of precision and recall. Precision is the percentage of positive predictions that are actually positive. Recall is the percentage of actual positives that the model correctly identifies. Classification performance can often be summarized with a precision-recall curve, which shows the trade-off between precision and recall for different threshold values.
Some common metrics include:
- Precision at your operating threshold (e.g., 95%)
- Recall at that precision
- ROC-AUC for binary classification
- F1 score (harmonic mean of precision and recall)
- PR-AUC for overall model quality
- False positive rate for different content segments
- Per-class performance for multi-class classification systems
Evaluation Methodology
For online evaluation, you'll often want to implement a shadow mode test where the model makes predictions but doesn't take action, allowing reviewers to validate results. Once confidence is established, move to an A/B test measuring both technical metrics and business impacts like user retention and reviewer workload.
For offline evaluation, establish a balanced test set with stratified sampling to ensure adequate representation of all content categories. Use precision-recall curves to find the optimal threshold that maintains your required precision while maximizing recall. The important thing is that your offline evaluation is correlated with the outcomes of your online evaluations!
Address Challenges
Classification systems face several significant evaluation challenges that need to be addressed for effective deployment:
Class Imbalance
Most real-world classification problems have highly imbalanced class distributions. For example, in fraud detection, legitimate transactions vastly outnumber fraudulent ones. This effects the datasets you assemble for evaluation, and the metrics you choose to evaluate. For highly imbalanced problems, PR-AUC is a far better metric than ROC-AUC. In interviews, you may also want to talk about a loop for discovering previously unseen instances of the minority class.
Label Efficiency
Obtaining high-quality labels is often expensive and time-consuming, especially for specialized domains requiring expert knowledge. Especially in the presence of class imbalance, random sampling is a poor way to acquire labels which will reduce variance in your evaluation metrics. Employing stratified sampling approaches using classifiers scores can be useful, or even using active learning to prioritize labeling the most informative examples.
Estimating Prevalence
In many applications, the true prevalence of positive cases in production may be hard to measure: in most cases you won't know the "right" answer without expending considerable resources (e.g. running a human review), hence the reason for the ML system in the first place. Random sampling is a good, unbiased way to estimate prevalence but suffers from high variance. Imagine you have a problem where <1% of the data is positive: if you randomly sample 100 examples you'll only have 1 positive example to estimate prevalence from.
Feedback Loops
Finally, classification systems can create feedback loops where the model's predictions influence future test data, potentially amplifying biases or errors over time. Some ways to solve this include: regularly inject randomness into the system (e.g. withhold actions you might otherwise take) to explore the full data space, or maintain a golden set of examples unaffected by the model's decisions.
Recommender Systems
In recommender systems, we present a ranked list of items (movies, products, news, users to follow) that we believe a user will engage with. Unlike binary classification, the system's value is tied to ordering and diversity rather than a single yes/no prediction. Evaluation is therefore less about "Did we get the label right?" and more about "Did we surface the right set of items, in the right order, at the right time—while staying within business constraints such as inventory, policy, or contractual obligations?"
Example problems: Product recommendations on an e-commerce site, video recommendations on a streaming platform, friend suggestions in a social network.
Business Objective
The action triggered by a recommender is a user decision: click, purchase, watch, or follow. That decision translates into revenue (direct sales, ad impressions, subscription retention) and also into exposure cost: surfacing the wrong item can waste scarce inventory slots or even drive users away. Always ask yourself:
What is the dollar value of one additional relevant recommendation?
What is the opportunity cost of showing an irrelevant or policy-violating item?
What is the opportunity cost of showing an irrelevant or policy-violating item?
For instance, a streaming service may prize completion rate (finished episodes boost retention), while a retail marketplace may focus on gross merchandise value net of return risk.
Product Metrics
Because recommendation funnels are long, product metrics usually accumulate over sessions rather than single impressions. These make for more interesting, longitudinal evaluation challenges:
- Session watch/purchase rate per user
- Average revenue per user (ARPU) or Gross Merchandise Value (GMV)/user
- Retention or churn-deferral rate over N-day windows
- Inventory utilization (how evenly the catalog is surfaced)
- Dwell time (are we creating "doom-scrolling" that later harms satisfaction?)
ML Metrics
Classic information retrieval metrics dominate, but each carries pitfalls:
- Mean Reciprocal Rank (MRR): sensitive to the very first relevant item—great for "top pick" use-cases.
- Normalized Discounted Cumulative Gain (NDCG): discounts relevance by log-rank; good all-rounder.
- Hit@K / Recall@K: fraction of sessions where at least one relevant item appears in the top K.
- Coverage: proportion of catalog shown over a time window—critical for cold-start sellers and long-tail content.
- Calibration / Expected Rating Error: does the score distribution match observed engagement probabilities?
Evaluation Methodology
Offline: Build a leave-one-interaction-out test set so each user appears in train and test but with different timestamps. Replay the candidate-generation + ranking pipeline to compute ranking metrics. Watch for temporal leakage: including tomorrow's interactions in today's training will yield spectacular but meaningless scores.
Online: Deploy in shadow-rank mode—your model reorders items but the served order still comes from the baseline. Compare click-through on items that would change position. Once safe, graduate to an A/B bucket. Measure at least one short-term (CTR) and one long-term (retention) metric; if they diverge, you've found a trap. Remember that your experiments must be long enough to capture long-term effects!
Address Challenges
Evaluation Horizon
Immediate clicks are easy to measure; the true goal (renewed subscription six months later) is not. Use proxy metrics plus periodic hold-out cohorts to estimate long-range effects. Techniques like counterfactual evaluation with importance weighting help, but high variance is a constant menace.
Feedback Loops
Just as in classification, recommender outputs influence future training logs. Over time the model trains on its own echo chamber. Solutions: periodically inject exploration traffic (e.g., ε-greedy or Thompson Sampling), maintain a uniformly-sampled "golden" interaction set, and retrain with counterfactual logging to debias.
By articulating these objectives, metrics, and pitfalls, you'll demonstrate a holistic grasp of recommender-system evaluation—precisely what interviewers look for in a system-design setting.
Search & Information Retrieval Systems
Search and information-retrieval (IR) systems take a query (text, voice, image, etc.) and return an ordered list of results. Unlike binary classifiers, IR systems must rank thousands of candidates and satisfy users, usually in a very short time window (e.g. 100ms), so evaluation balances relevance, speed, and business impact.
Example problems: Web search, e-commerce product search, code search, enterprise document retrieval
Business Objective
Ask "what happens when the user finds (or fails to find) the right result?" and "how does that affect the business?"
- In web search, satisfied users return tomorrow, driving ad revenue.
- In product search, higher relevance lifts conversion and average order value.
- In enterprise search, faster retrieval lowers employee time-to-answer and support costs.
Product Metrics
Typical top-line signals include:
- Query success rate (did the session end with a click/purchase?)
- Click-through rate (CTR) on the first results page
- Time to first meaningful interaction
- Session abandon rate
- Revenue or conversions per search
- Latency-p99 for search requests
- Query reformulation rate (proxy for dissatisfaction)
ML Metrics
IR quality is usually summarized with rank-aware metrics calculated at cut-off k. k is fixed as a product parameter: if your UI shows 10 results above the fold, optimizing NDCG@k aligns well with user satisfaction.
- Precision@k / Recall@k – fraction of the top k results that are relevant vs. fraction of relevant docs retrieved
- Mean Reciprocal Rank (MRR) – focuses on the first relevant result
- Normalized Discounted Cumulative Gain (NDCG@k) – weights high-rank relevance more heavily
- Mean Average Precision (MAP) – averages precision across recall levels
- Hit Rate / Success@k – at least one relevant doc in top k
Evaluation Methodology
Offline — Build a held-out set of (query, doc, graded-relevance) triples. Compute NDCG@k, MRR, latency, and cost. Maintain diversity: head, torso, and long-tail queries; freshness-sensitive vs. evergreen; different locales.
Online — Deploy in shadow (rank but don't serve) to check latency & safety. Graduate to A/B or interleaving tests measuring CTR, revenue, latency, and downstream actions (purchases, page views). Verify offline gains correlate with online wins; if not, revisit labeling or bias correction.
Address Challenges
Query Ambiguity
Many queries have multiple possible interpretations or intents (e.g., "jaguar" could refer to the animal, car, or sports team). This ambiguity makes it difficult to evaluate relevance since the "correct" results depend on user intent. To address this challenge, you can implement intent classification systems that detect and categorize query intent, allowing for per-intent evaluation of results. Diversification strategies ensure results cover multiple possible intents in proportion to their popularity. User behavior analysis through click patterns helps understand intent distribution, while tracking query refinements provides insight into how users naturally disambiguate their queries.
Long-Tail & Sparse Judgments
The vast majority of search queries are unique or very rare (the "long tail"), making it impractical to collect relevance judgments for every possible query. Active learning approaches help prioritize which queries to label by selecting those that will most improve model understanding. Query clustering techniques allow sharing of relevance judgments among similar queries, while synthetic query generation creates artificial queries to test specific ranking aspects. Transfer learning enables applying relevance signals from head queries to similar tail queries. Modern approaches also leverage large language models for zero-shot evaluation of relevance without explicit labels.
Freshness & Recency
Search systems must balance serving fresh content with maintaining result quality, especially for time-sensitive queries. This requires tracking temporal relevance to understand how quickly results become stale for different query types. Systems need to monitor crawl latency from content creation to searchability and maintain metrics on index freshness. Query classification helps identify which queries require fresh results versus those that can use evergreen content. Time-based decay functions can be applied to relevance scores to naturally deprecate older content when appropriate.
Feedback Loops
Search systems can create self-reinforcing cycles where popular results get more clicks, leading to higher rankings and more clicks. Breaking this cycle requires regularly injecting randomness into rankings to gather unbiased feedback. Position bias can be addressed through inverse propensity scoring and click data debiasing. Interleaving techniques enable system comparison through paired tests with reduced variance. Maintaining golden sets unaffected by feedback loops provides stable evaluation baselines, while diversity metrics ensure coverage of the full result space rather than just popular items.
Generative AI Systems
In generative systems, the model produces new content like text, images, code, audio rather than selecting from predefined labels. The biggest evaluation hurdle is that "correctness" is often subjective: a response may be valid in multiple ways, yet still miss brand tone, factual accuracy, or user intent. Resource-wise, reference answers are costly to gather, and human review is slow, so smart sampling and proxy metrics become essential.
Example problems: Chat assistants, code generation, image synthesis, customer support bot
Business Objective
Ask "What value does the generated content unlock?" and "What harms must we prevent?"
A support chatbot's goal is deflecting tickets without frustrating customers; an image tool aims to boost ad-click-through while avoiding brand-unsafe outputs. These objectives translate into retention, revenue lift, and moderation workload.
A support chatbot's goal is deflecting tickets without frustrating customers; an image tool aims to boost ad-click-through while avoiding brand-unsafe outputs. These objectives translate into retention, revenue lift, and moderation workload.
Product Metrics
Product metrics for generative AI systems are highly dependent on the application. Here are some common ones:
- Task success rate (e.g., ticket fully resolved)
- Average handle time (when humans intervene)
- User satisfaction / Net Promoter Score (NPS, "how likely are you to recommend this product to a friend?")
- Brand-safety incident rate & review cost
- Prompt–response latency
- Down-stream engagement (clicks, watch-time, etc.)
ML Metrics
Generative quality rarely fits a single scalar, and interviewers aren't expecting just a single metric. Use a portfolio of metrics and don't shy away from setting up custom evaluators:
- Semantic similarity: BERTScore, BLEURT
- Factuality / hallucination rate: task-specific fact checkers
- Toxicity & bias scores: perspective or hate-speech models
- Diversity metrics: self-BLEU, distinct-n
- Human ratings: pairwise preference or Likert scale
- Custom metrics: % of refusals, % of hallucinations, etc.
Evaluation Methodology
Offline:
Create a stratified test set of prompts covering intents, languages, edge-cases, and policy red-lines. For text, collect multiple reference answers or use pairwise ranking. Measure quality metrics, run toxicity detectors, and slice by domain.
Create a stratified test set of prompts covering intents, languages, edge-cases, and policy red-lines. For text, collect multiple reference answers or use pairwise ranking. Measure quality metrics, run toxicity detectors, and slice by domain.
Online:
Ship in (shadow) mode first: generate suggestions but hide them from users, logging quality signals. Graduate to A/B where the new model handles a % of traffic; monitor business KPIs + safety dashboards. Always keep a "golden canary" set of prompts served by a legacy model for drift detection.
Ship in (shadow) mode first: generate suggestions but hide them from users, logging quality signals. Graduate to A/B where the new model handles a % of traffic; monitor business KPIs + safety dashboards. Always keep a "golden canary" set of prompts served by a legacy model for drift detection.
Address Challenges
Evaluating generative AI systems is the grand challenge of the coming decade, so there are no easy answers here but there are a lot of potholes to avoid. Interviewers are looking to see that you can think through these challenges, or in some cases (for a generative AI-focused loop), that you've seen them yourself.
Subjective Quality
Unlike classification tasks, generative outputs often have no single "correct" answer, making evaluation inherently subjective. To address this, implement multi-reference evaluation by collecting multiple valid outputs for each input. Build scalable workflows for expert review through human evaluation pipelines, and train preference learning models to predict human preferences. Breaking down evaluation into specific aspects like fluency, coherence, and style helps make the subjective more measurable. Regular re-evaluation of hard cases and edge cases ensures the system maintains quality across the full range of outputs.
Hallucination & Factual Consistency
Generative models can produce confident but incorrect statements, requiring careful evaluation of factual accuracy. Implement source attribution systems to track which generated content can be verified against source material. Automated fact checking against knowledge bases helps catch obvious errors, while retrieval augmentation improves accuracy by grounding generations in verified information. Monitor the correlation between model confidence and correctness through calibration metrics, and develop taxonomies to classify different types of hallucinations based on their severity and impact.
Safety and Policy Compliance
Toxic, biased, or illicit outputs carry legal and brand risk. The evaluation of safety systems must focus particularly on false-negative rates, as missing a problematic output often carries more risk than incorrectly flagging a safe one. Regular red-team testing and adversarial evaluation help identify potential vulnerabilities.
Evaluation Cost
Human evaluation is expensive and slow, requiring efficient use of review resources. Active learning approaches help prioritize review of uncertain or novel outputs, while automated filters provide fast initial screening. Develop efficient sampling strategies that cover the input space effectively while minimizing redundant review. Create proxy metrics that correlate well with human judgment to reduce reliance on manual review. Optimize the distribution of review resources across different quality dimensions based on their impact and risk. Stratified sampling is a good way to ensure you're covering the full range of inputs.
Distribution Shift
User behavior and content patterns evolve over time, requiring continuous evaluation adaptation. Implement drift detection systems to monitor changes in input distribution and model performance. Maintain rolling windows of recent traffic in test sets to ensure evaluation remains relevant (i.e. hold out based on time, not just randomly). Use stable benchmark sets as canaries to detect model degradation, and develop clear adaptation strategies for regular model updates. Version control systems should track changes in both model behavior and evaluation criteria to maintain consistency over time.
Appendix: Intuitive Explanation of Key Metrics
Classification Metrics
- Intuition: "When the model says something is harmful content, how often is it right?"
- Calculation: (True Positives) / (True Positives + False Positives)
- Intuition: "What percentage of all harmful content does the model catch?"
- Calculation: (True Positives) / (True Positives + False Negatives)
- Intuition: "How well does the model balance precision and recall across different thresholds?"
- Ranges from 0 to 1, with higher values being better
- Intuition: "A single number balancing how many positives we catch vs. how accurate our positive predictions are"
- Calculation: 2 * (Precision * Recall) / (Precision + Recall)
- Intuition: "How well does the model distinguish between classes across different thresholds?"
- Ranges from 0 to 1, with higher values being better
- Note: Can be misleading for imbalanced datasets
Ranking Metrics
- Intuition: "How well are the most relevant items ranked at the top?"
- Calculation: Sum the relevance scores of results, discounted by position (items lower in the ranking contribute less), then normalize by the "ideal" ranking
- Higher positions matter much more than lower ones
- Intuition: "Average of precision values calculated at each relevant item in the ranking"
- Rewards rankings where relevant items appear earlier
- Calculation: For each query, find the average precision at each relevant result, then average across all queries
- Intuition: "The average of 1/position for the first relevant result"
- Focuses solely on the position of the first relevant item
- Perfect score (1.0) means the first result is always relevant
Image Generation Metrics
- Intuition: "How similar is the distribution of generated images to real images?"
- Lower scores mean the generated images have similar statistical properties to real images
- Measures both quality and diversity
- Intuition: "How well does the generated image match the text prompt?"
- Higher scores indicate better text-image alignment
- Based on how close the image and text embeddings are in a shared space
Text Generation Metrics
- Intuition: "How surprised is the model by the actual text?"
- Lower values indicate the model assigns higher probability to the correct tokens
- Calculation: 2^(negative log likelihood per token)
- Intuition: "How similar is the generated text to reference text?"
- Measure overlap of n-grams (BLEU/ROUGE) or semantic similarity (BERTScore)
- Higher values indicate greater similarity to references
Remember, no single metric tells the whole story. The best evaluation approaches use multiple complementary metrics and align them with business objectives.
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On This Page
General Evaluation Framework for Interviews
Classification Systems
Business Objective
Product Metrics
ML Metrics
Evaluation Methodology
Address Challenges
Recommender Systems
Business Objective
Product Metrics
ML Metrics
Evaluation Methodology
Address Challenges
Search & Information Retrieval Systems
Business Objective
Product Metrics
ML Metrics
Evaluation Methodology
Address Challenges
Generative AI Systems
Business Objective
Product Metrics
ML Metrics
Evaluation Methodology
Address Challenges
Appendix: Intuitive Explanation of Key Metrics
Classification Metrics
Ranking Metrics
Image Generation Metrics
Text Generation Metrics
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