The Question
ML Design
Scalable Multi-Stage Ads Ranking System
Design a high-scale ads ranking and auction system capable of handling a corpus of 100 million ads and 500k QPS. The system must optimize for platform revenue (eCPM) while adhering to a strict 100ms latency budget. Detail the multi-stage funnel (retrieval, ranking, auction), feature engineering for sparse data, and strategies for model calibration and ad cold-start.
Two-Tower
DCN-v2
Faiss
MMoE
HNSW
Kafka
Flink
Spark
Horovod
TensorRT
Feast
Redis
March 18, 2026