Architecture and Technical Trade Offs Questions

Centers on system and solution design decisions and the trade offs inherent in architecture choices. Candidates should be able to identify alternatives, clarify constraints such as scale cost and team capability, and articulate trade offs like consistency versus availability, latency versus throughput, simplicity versus extensibility, monolith versus microservices, synchronous versus asynchronous patterns, database selection, caching strategies, and operational complexity. This topic covers methods for quantifying or qualitatively evaluating impacts, prototyping and measuring performance, planning incremental migrations, documenting decisions, and proposing mitigation and monitoring plans to manage risk and maintainability.

HardTechnical

0 practiced

Develop a quantitative model to estimate the change in infrastructure cost and query latency when reducing dashboard refresh interval from 60 minutes to 1 minute across a fleet of 200 dashboards. Describe assumptions, variables (compute per query, concurrency, cache reuse), and how you'd validate the model with a pilot. Provide example calculations or formulas you would use.

MediumSystem Design

0 practiced

Design a dashboard architecture to support the following requirements:\n- 10,000 daily active users with ~200 concurrent interactive sessions\n- Near-real-time metrics: data freshness ≤ 5 minutes\n- p95 interactive query latency ≤ 2s\n- Moderate budget and low operational overhead\nDescribe the end-to-end components (ingest/read path, caches, materializations, APIs, front-end), justify trade-offs (freshness vs cost, precompute vs on-demand), and outline a monitoring plan to prove SLAs.

MediumTechnical

0 practiced

You are responsible for migrating a legacy monolithic BI reporting system into an embedded analytics microservice consumed by product teams. Outline an incremental migration plan that minimizes disruption: API design principles, compatibility and backfill strategies, feature-flagged rollouts, consumer migration steps, rollback plans, and KPIs to track. Explain trade-offs of a gradual migration versus a big-bang cutover.

MediumSystem Design

0 practiced

Design an API for serving aggregated metrics to dashboards that supports filtering, pagination, time windows, and consistent snapshots. Discuss the trade-offs between synchronous endpoints that compute on-demand versus asynchronous endpoints that return job IDs and how to provide consistent snapshots for a user session to avoid confusing drift during drilldowns.

HardTechnical

0 practiced

You discover multiple teams using slightly different definitions for the same KPI, producing inconsistent executive numbers. Describe an architecture and governance plan to establish a single source of truth: include versioned data contracts, authoritative pipelines, ownership model, migration strategy for existing dashboards, and how to manage stakeholder disagreements during standardization.

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