Advanced Real World Problem Solving Questions

Evaluate the candidates ability to solve complex multi layered technical and design problems by making reasonable assumptions, articulating trade offs, and handling edge cases. Candidates should show how to decompose problems that span networking caching persistence and performance optimization, select architectures and algorithms with explicit trade off analysis such as speed versus simplicity and functionality versus performance, and consider failure modes including network failures device limitations and concurrent access patterns. Strong responses include clear assumption statements, alternative approaches, complexity and cost considerations, testing and validation strategies, and plans to monitor and mitigate operational risks.

EasyTechnical

0 practiced

Explain the circuit-breaker pattern and how it protects a data-ingestion pipeline from cascading failures. Describe the states (closed, open, half-open), how to choose thresholds/timeout windows, and simple fallback strategies a data engineer could implement when downstream indexing or enrichment services are unavailable.

HardSystem Design

0 practiced

You must design cache invalidation at massive scale: millions of keys, cross-region caches, and hundreds of services producing updates. Propose an architecture using CDC or change-events to drive invalidation, describe sequencing to avoid race conditions (e.g., version numbers, monotonic timestamps), and how to avoid thundering-herd issues.

MediumTechnical

0 practiced

Implement a simple consistent-hashing ring in Python that maps string keys to nodes and supports adding/removing nodes with minimal remapping. Use virtual nodes for balance. Provide code signature and an example: get_node(key) -> node_id. (You don't need to implement network calls, focus on the ring and lookup behavior.)

HardSystem Design

0 practiced

Plan a migration to break a monolithic data API into microservices with zero downtime. Describe strangler pattern steps, dual-writing strategies, schema/contract compatibility measures, canary rollout, and how you would test correctness and rollback safely in production traffic.

MediumTechnical

0 practiced

A bulk update needs to update a user profile across email-service, search-index, and analytics pipelines. Design the failure-handling strategy: discuss the transactional-outbox pattern, saga-based compensations, ordering guarantees, and how to make the process observable and resumable by operators.

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