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.

MediumTechnical

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For near-real-time analytics, compare stream processing frameworks (Flink, Structured Streaming, Beam) versus micro-batch architectures (Spark micro-batch). Evaluate trade-offs in latency, state management, fault tolerance, operational complexity, and developer ergonomics for a data engineering team.

HardTechnical

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For a high-throughput streaming pipeline, evaluate exactly-once versus at-least-once semantics. Propose an end-to-end design to achieve effectively exactly-once delivery (idempotent sinks, transactional writes, deduplication windows) and discuss performance, complexity, and operational trade-offs.

MediumTechnical

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You must migrate a monolithic ETL pipeline to microservices to improve deployment velocity. Outline a phased migration plan that minimizes risk, supports rollback, ensures data correctness, and keeps SLAs intact. Include testing strategies, dual-write or shadowing approaches, and monitoring changes.

HardTechnical

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A critical production pipeline shows silent data loss between stages (some events are missing downstream with no obvious errors). As the on-call data engineer, provide a step-by-step incident response: immediate mitigations, evidence collection, root cause analysis approach, and long-term prevention (instrumentation, contracts, reconciliations).

HardTechnical

0 practiced

Design an Architecture Decision Record (ADR) process for documenting and reviewing architecture trade-offs in a large data platform. Include who should be involved, approval criteria, rollout and rollback plans, decision visibility, and how to revisit or deprecate decisions over time.

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