Anthropic
OpenAIBased on real interviews
RAG design memo: internal knowledge assistant
Design an internal knowledge assistant that gives useful, verifiable answers when engineers need them most.
Unlock with Full AccessThe challenge
Engineers and on-call responders need answers from a collection of wikis, runbooks, tickets and incident reports. Traffic can surge during an incident, precisely when a confident but incorrect answer about a runbook would be most damaging.
Write the design memo for an eight-week build. Connect indexing, retrieval and answer generation to verifiable citations, a credible latency and cost budget, and a launch evaluation. The brief also leaves an access assumption for you to resolve before documents can safely be served.
What you'll practise
Retrieval architecture
Make different kinds of internal documents useful for answering questions.
Reliability and access
Account for misleading answers, missing information and document permissions.
Launch evaluation
Define evidence that would justify shipping the assistant.
Explain the retrieval approach and how you would evaluate it.