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State Management and Data Flow Architecture Questions

Design and reasoning about where and how data is stored, moved, synchronized, and represented across the full application stack and in distributed systems. Topics include data persistence strategies in databases and services, application programming interface shape and schema design to minimize client complexity, validation and security at each layer, pagination and lazy loading patterns, caching strategies and cache invalidation, approaches to asynchronous fetching and loading states, real time updates and synchronization techniques, offline support and conflict resolution, optimistic updates and reconciliation, eventual consistency models, and deciding what data lives on the client versus the server. Coverage also includes separation between user interface state and persistent data state, local component state versus global state stores including lifted state and context patterns, frontend caching strategies, data flow and event propagation patterns, normalization and denormalization trade offs, unidirectional versus bidirectional flow, and operational concerns such as scalability, failure modes, monitoring, testing, and observability. Candidates should be able to reason about trade offs between latency, consistency, complexity, and developer ergonomics and propose monitoring and testing strategies for these systems.

EasyTechnical
0 practiced
Explain eventual consistency in distributed systems. Provide two concrete examples where eventual consistency is acceptable and two where it's not. As an SRE, which monitoring/alerting signals would you rely on to detect when eventual consistency is violating user expectations?
EasyTechnical
0 practiced
List and briefly describe four cache invalidation strategies (e.g., TTL, cache-aside, write-through, event invalidation). For each, explain a typical failure mode and an SRE mitigation to make the strategy reliable in production.
HardTechnical
0 practiced
Compare optimistic concurrency control (OCC) and pessimistic locking for distributed microservices that update shared state (e.g., inventory). Discuss performance, developer ergonomics, failure modes, and SRE operational considerations for each approach.
HardTechnical
0 practiced
You're seeing 95th percentile increase in end-to-end API latency under load. Propose a diagnostics plan to identify whether the cause is database read latency, cache miss rate, network saturation, or client-side serialization. Describe short-term mitigations and long-term architectural changes to reduce tail latency.
HardTechnical
0 practiced
Provide a principled checklist to decide whether a particular dataset should live on the client (for offline/latency) or remain server-only (for security, size, consistency). Include factors like sensitivity, size, update frequency, network reliability, and developer ergonomics.

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