7 Essential System Design Patterns for AI Engineers in Interviews

7 system design patterns you should know in your AI engineer interviews 👇

1. API Gateway
→ Single entry point for all requests, handles auth, routing, rate limiting

2. Rate Limiting
→ Your first financial defense against denial-of-wallet attacks on inference APIs

3. Caching
→ Don't compute the same embedding 200 times for "reset my password"

4. Message Queues
→ Decouple heavy async work like batch summarization from sync requests

5. Circuit Breakers
→ Stop cascading failures when your vector store starts timing out

6. Load Balancing
→ Distribute across GPU nodes with weighted strategies, not round-robin

7. Auto Scaling
→ Scale on GPU utilization and queue depth, not CPU metrics that lie to you

The interviewer isn't expecting a distributed systems PhD.
They're checking that you think beyond the model.

Full breakdown here:

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