InterviewStack.io LogoInterviewStack.io

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
Given nested JSON where posts contain nested comments and embedded user objects, explain why and how you would normalize that data for a client-side cache/store. Describe the before and after structures, the impact on update operations, and how normalization helps with caching and consistency.
EasyTechnical
0 practiced
Compare cursor-based pagination with offset-based pagination for APIs. For a frequently-updated feed (high insert rate at the head), explain which approach you would pick and why. Provide a sample response shape for a cursor-based page and mention how you would encode/expire cursors.
HardTechnical
0 practiced
You are seeing intermittent duplicates and missing items in a paginated transaction list shown to clients. The backend is eventually consistent and has concurrent writes. Describe a troubleshooting plan: which logs, traces, and client telemetry to collect; synthetic tests to reproduce; short-term mitigations you can roll out quickly; and long-term fixes.
HardTechnical
0 practiced
Explain and design a cache coherency approach across multiple microservices that each maintain local caches of shared entities. Compare strategies such as push invalidation via events, pull with TTL, centralized cache, or distributed coherence protocols. Discuss scaling, failure modes, ordering guarantees, and operational complexity.
HardTechnical
0 practiced
Propose concrete metrics and alerting rules to detect when eventual consistency problems are affecting user experience, such as stale reads, lost writes, or reconciliation failures. Describe instrumentation points in clients and services, what logs and traces to collect, and how to prioritize incidents.

Unlock Full Question Bank

Get access to hundreds of State Management and Data Flow Architecture interview questions and detailed answers.

Sign in to Continue

Join thousands of developers preparing for their dream job.