Design an event recommendation system (events, jobs, or other time-sensitive items).
Recommending events (or jobs) breaks ordinary recsys in two spots: items expire and items are local. What matters is how you handle perishability, geography, and the fact that every item is a cold-start item. Here is the design.
Updated Sep 2026 · Grounded in real GenAI, LLM, and AI/ML engineering interview loops and written to a senior-engineer editorial bar.
Recommending events (or jobs) breaks ordinary recsys in two spots: items expire and items are local. What matters is how you handle perishability, geography, and the fact that every item is a cold-start item. Here is the design.
Lead with where the obvious approach breaks, because that is the judgment they are screening for — most candidates jump straight to the happy path and lose the room.
Then walk the failure back through the pipeline in order, naming the one metric the customer's exec sponsor actually cares about before you propose the fix.
