Design an ML platform for twenty teams
Twenty product teams currently train and deploy models however they like: some in notebooks on laptops, some in ad-hoc SageMaker jobs, two with a real CI pipeline. There are around 60 models in production and nobody can produce a list of them.
You have been asked to build a central platform. You have four engineers and twelve months. The teams do not report to you and cannot be compelled to adopt anything.
The stated goals: know what is in production, make deployments reproducible, and reduce time-to-production. Nobody has asked for the platform to run the training.
Design this — including your adoption strategy, since you cannot mandate it. Tell me what you build first, what you deliberately do not build, and how you would know in six months whether it is working.
Choose how you want to be interrogated
The same case under two modes is two different exercises. If you are unsure, RCA drill is the one that trains root-cause analysis most directly.
RCA drill
A symptom, and nothing else. Find the cause and prove it.
Trains: Hypothesis generation, ranking by prior, and naming the test that discriminates.
Red team
You propose. It attacks. It is trying to make you wrong.
Trains: Defending a position under pressure, and noticing when you should concede.
Socratic
Questions only. It will never tell you the answer.
Trains: Deriving from first principles instead of retrieving from memory.
Design review
Present an architecture. Justify every trade-off you made.
Trains: Stating what you optimised and what you gave up, on purpose.
Viva
Rapid escalating questions. Ends in a graded verdict.
Trains: Answering under time pressure without hedging.
Integration
Problems that span several domains at once. The hardest mode.
Trains: Reasoning across boundaries, where the cause is in a different system to the symptom.
Before you start: you begin locked. The Mentor will give you nothing — not a nudge, not a category — until you state a specific position and the mechanism you think produces it. Four genuine attempts unlock the resolution. There is no shortcut.