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. Dense retrieval is there for semantic intent and paraphrase. Then merge the candidates with...

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