Personalized Financial News Feed

Interview type: ML system design onsite
Role: Machine Learning Engineer
Reported: June 2025

Problem Statement

Design a personalized financial-news feed for Robinhood. It should surface market and investing articles that are useful to each user by combining signals such as their watchlist, portfolio interests, reading history, current market conditions, and article attributes.

This is an ML recommendation-system design discussion. Address how the feed identifies candidates, orders them, handles rapidly changing content, serves results online, records user interactions, creates training data, and measures performance. Your design should also account for finance-specific concerns, including market-sensitive stories, publisher reliability, the dangers of excessive personalization, and content that is outdated or potentially misleading.

Common Aliases

• Build a recommendation feed for financial news
• Design a news recommendation system
• Create a personalized news stream for a trading application
• Design recommendations for investing and market articles

Recommendation system architecture for personalized financial news feed