Design a hybrid retrieval stack with embeddings, lexical search, and reranking.

Instruction: Describe how you would design a hybrid retrieval pipeline and decide which layer does what.

Context: Assesses whether the candidate can design a practical architecture and explain the main tradeoffs. Describe how you would design a hybrid retrieval pipeline and decide which layer does what.

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I would design hybrid retrieval as a staged system. First, use lexical search and dense retrieval in parallel to generate complementary candidate sets. Lexical is there for exact identifiers, quoted phrases, and rare terms...

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