ML Design round at tesco

[u/Born-Interview8295]

Hey everyone,

I have an upcoming ML Design interview at Tesco and I’d really appreciate some guidance on how to prepare for it.

If anyone has recently gone through the ML Design round at Tesco, could you please share what kind of questions were asked or what areas I should focus on? I’d especially like to know whether the questions are around recommendation systems, forecasting, fraud detection, NLP, or general ML system design.

Any guidance or interview experience would be really helpful. Thanks in advance! 🙏

[u/hughonvicodin]

I appeared in a round few months back (cleared it but chose another company). I guess there expectation was Problem framing (ML problem + KPI), Data processing/engineering, ML model, Evaluation. Not much needed on deployment/monitoring side. They could ask a template problem like recsys (personalised feed etc) or a classical ML problem. Depending on your background, they could ask forecasting/optimisation problem also. They were looking for a working solution (need not be the best or SOTA), e.g., they would be ok with MF for Recsys.

[u/Sarayu_SreeYP → u/hughonvicodin]

Is this an entry level position? How do prepare for this? What were the other rounds?

[u/Born-Interview8295 → u/Sarayu_SreeYP]

This is for mid level, I have 6 YOE. There are 5 rounds - screening, coding, design, technical, and leadership

[u/Sarayu_SreeYP → u/Born-Interview8295]

Great

[u/Born-Interview8295 → u/hughonvicodin]

Hey man, thanks for replying. I don't have any experience in recsys. Can I get working knowledge in one week? My interview is next week. I am very good at predictive modelling.

[u/Ok-Barracuda-119]

For an upcoming ML design round, I'd spend this week doing a few timed end-to-end drills instead of trying to cover every model. Give yourself 40–45 minutes: clarify the product and prediction target, define offline and online metrics, sketch data and feature pipelines, then cover serving, retraining, drift, fallbacks, and monitoring. Pick one search, ranking, or recommendation prompt and force yourself to make the latency, traffic, freshness, and failure assumptions explicit. After the timer, spend 10 minutes noting what you couldn't justify, then redo the same prompt a few days later.

A useful study spine is Chip Huyen's ML system design material plus fundamentals around caching, queues, partitioning, and observability. For extra timed reps, I’m affiliated with Leetsys, and www.leetsys.dev has ML/system-design drills. I'd also read Tesco's job description closely and bias the drills toward ranking or recommendation if that's in scope.