AI Architecture Challenges

Introduction

Architecture-design exercises for senior AI engineering interviews. Practise sketching whiteboard architectures end-to-end.

Understanding the topic

Core concepts to understand:

• Design 'ChatGPT for our company docs' (RAG + auth + multi-tenant).
• Design Perplexity (web research agent at scale).
• Design a coding copilot (code RAG + long context + edits).
• Design a 24/7 customer-support AI agent.
• Design an enterprise AI gateway across providers.

Syntax reference

Visual workflow / architecture:

Whiteboard checklist:
  - Data sources / ingestion
  - Vector DB + ACLs
  - Retrieval + re-rank
  - LLM + fallback
  - Tools / actions
  - Memory / sessions
  - Observability + evals
  - Cost + scaling
  - Security + compliance

Real-world use

Asked at Google, Meta, Amazon, Anthropic, OpenAI, Stripe AI roles.

Best practices

• Always start by clarifying requirements + scale.
• Sketch the data flow before details.
• Discuss trade-offs out loud.

Hands-on exercise

Interview preparation — practice these questions:

• Q1. Design ChatGPT for our company docs.
• Q2. What changes at 10× scale?
• Q3. How do you handle multi-tenancy?