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Data Pipeline Architecture Questions

Design end to end data pipeline solutions from problem statement through implementation and operations, integrating ingestion transformation storage serving and consumption layers. Topics include source selection and connectors, ingestion patterns including batch streaming and micro batch, transformation steps such as cleaning enrichment aggregation and filtering, and loading targets such as analytic databases data warehouses data lakes or operational stores. Cover architecture patterns and trade offs including lambda kappa and micro batch, delivery semantics and fault tolerance, partitioning and scaling strategies, schema evolution and data modeling for analytic and operational consumers, and choices driven by freshness latency throughput cost and operational complexity. Operational concerns include orchestration and scheduling, reliability considerations such as error handling retries idempotence and backpressure, monitoring and alerting, deployment and runbook planning, and how components work together as a coherent maintainable system. Interview focus is on turning requirements into concrete architectures, technology selection, and trade off reasoning.

HardTechnical
0 practiced
You're building a streaming feature pipeline that must join two high-throughput Kafka topics with different partition keys and event times. Explain strategies to achieve scalable and correct joins: repartitioning, keyBy semantics in Flink/Kafka Streams, windowing choices, watermark strategy, handling out-of-order events, and resource implications of state size and network shuffle.
HardSystem Design
0 practiced
Propose and justify a partitioning and clustering strategy for a feature table that will be queried by two workloads: ad-hoc time-range analytics and frequent user-centric joins for training. Discuss Hive-style partitions, Z-ordering (multi-dimensional clustering), bucketing, and secondary indexes. Explain migration steps when access patterns change.
MediumTechnical
0 practiced
Explain how to design a cost-optimized ETL pipeline that ingests hourly event data and stores aggregated features generating ~50TB/month. Consider compute versus storage trade-offs, use of spot/spot-preemptible instances, file compaction strategies, data lifecycle policies, and methods to control costs while meeting freshness SLAs.
HardTechnical
0 practiced
A streaming aggregation job's state is exploding due to very high-cardinality keys (user_id). Provide strategies to reduce state size: approximate algorithms (HyperLogLog for distinct counts), bloom filters, TTLs, pre-aggregation, partitioning/hot-key handling, and offloading cold keys to external stores. Propose a concrete plan to reduce state by 10x while keeping error under 1%.
MediumTechnical
0 practiced
You must select storage for offline training datasets: a data warehouse (BigQuery/Redshift), a data lake (S3 + Parquet), or a hybrid table format (Delta Lake/Iceberg). Given requirements: ad-hoc SQL for data scientists, large-scale distributed training with Spark, and cost sensitivity, compare trade-offs and recommend an architecture with reasons.

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