Design a text-to-image generation service (Midjourney/DALL-E-like) at scale.
A GPU-heavy generative system where sampling steps drive the bill and a single bad image becomes a headline. The signal is the diffusion serving pipeline, the cost levers on per-image GPU time, and a required two-sided safety layer.
Updated Sep 2026 · Grounded in real GenAI, LLM, and AI/ML engineering interview loops and written to a senior-engineer editorial bar.
A GPU-heavy generative system where sampling steps drive the bill and a single bad image becomes a headline. The signal is the diffusion serving pipeline, the cost levers on per-image GPU time, and a required two-sided safety layer.
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.