ML System Design + Interview Prep

All 5 Phases

Week-by-Week Schedule

Topics Covered

Every subtopic below is a separate daily task in the roadmap, with hand-picked resources (YouTube videos, docs, papers) for each.

• Two pointers pattern
• Sliding window
• Hash maps / sets
• Prefix sum
• Mock interview practice on Pramp
• Catch-up + pattern review
• Blind 75 progress — aim for 15 problems done
• Binary trees: DFS (pre/in/post), BFS
• BST operations + LCA
• Graphs: BFS/DFS, connected components
• Topological sort, Union-Find
• DP basics: climbing stairs, coin change
• DP intermediate: LIS, edit distance
• Heaps: top-K, merge K sorted lists
• The 8-step framework
• Steps 1-2: Requirements, metrics
• Steps 3-4: ML problem framing, data strategy
• Steps 5-6: Feature engineering, model architecture
• Steps 7-8: Training pipeline, serving + monitoring
• Case Study 1: Video Recommendation System (YouTube)
• Write your own design doc for the case study
• Tue — Search & Ranking System — Aminian
• Thu — Ad Click Prediction at Scale — Aminian
• RAG Chatbot Architecture — use your Project 3 as starting point
• Content Moderation System — Aminian
• Fraud Detection (imbalanced, real-time) — Aminian
• Backtracking: subsets, permutations, N-queens
• Greedy: interval scheduling, jump game
• Binary search variants
• Trie problems
• Bit manipulation basics
• Hard DP: knapsack, LCS
• Mock interview on Pramp + review
• Why gradient descent works. Cross-entropy derivation.
• Bias-variance tradeoff. L1 vs L2.
• Batch norm vs Layer norm. Vanishing gradients + ResNet.
• Adam math (first + second moments). MSE vs cross-entropy.
• Self-attention from scratch. Q/K/V.
• LoRA math + why it works. RLHF end-to-end. KV cache.
• SFT vs RLHF vs DPO. Build Anki deck of 100+ Q&A.
• Rewrite resume (Action verb → What → Result with numbers)
• Polish all GitHub repos: clean READMEs, architecture diagrams, demo GIFs
• Build portfolio website (GitHub Pages + template)
• LinkedIn profile overhaul — keywords for recruiter search
• Prepare 8 STAR stories (Eldan's page 14)
• Practice STAR stories out loud, record yourself
• Get resume reviewed: r/EngineeringResumes or senior
• Pramp DSA mock
• Pramp behavioral mock
• interviewing.io DSA mock or another Pramp
• ML system design mock with peer
• ML breadth mock with peer
• Review all feedback, identify weak spots
• Focused drilling on weak spots