Designing privacy focused technical and operational solutions that protect personal and sensitive data across the system lifecycle. Candidates should be able to specify appropriate technical privacy controls such as encryption at rest and in transit, strong authentication and role based access controls, anonymization and pseudonymization techniques, data minimization strategies, tokenization, and differential privacy approaches. They should also cover operational controls and processes including audit trails and logging, data retention and deletion policies, secure data handling procedures, vendor and third party data management, data subject request handling, and incident response for privacy breaches. Good answers connect privacy controls to system components, explain trade offs between usability and risk, demonstrate threat modeling and risk assessment for different data types and regulatory contexts, and describe how to operationalize privacy by design and privacy engineering practices within delivery teams.
EasyTechnical
0 practiced
Describe encryption at rest versus encryption in transit. List common implementation options (e.g., TLS, mTLS, disk encryption, database column encryption, envelope encryption) and explain where and why a Solutions Architect should apply each approach in a three-tier web application (client, API, database). Include a note about key management responsibilities.
MediumTechnical
0 practiced
Design a feature store and ML training pipeline that prevents leakage of PII into models while enabling explainability and lineage tracking. Include methods to store features (hashed or pseudonymized joins), safe feature joins across identity keys, auditability of feature usage, and how to sanitize explanation outputs (e.g., SHAP) so they don't reveal PII.
MediumSystem Design
0 practiced
Design logging and monitoring rules to detect potential privacy incidents such as large exports of user data, unusual data-access patterns, or privilege escalations. Specify telemetry events to capture (e.g., data-export, privileged-query, bulk reads), alerting thresholds, triage workflow, and how to minimize false positives while ensuring timely detection.
MediumSystem Design
0 practiced
Design an identity and access model that integrates SSO (SAML/OIDC), RBAC, and ABAC for a multi-tenant SaaS platform where tenants require per-tenant isolation and custom roles. Explain where policies are stored, how tokens propagate role/attribute claims, enforcement points in microservices, and how to audit access at tenant vs resource level.
MediumSystem Design
0 practiced
Design a consent-aware analytics pipeline that ingests events from mobile app, web, and server logs, using streaming (Kafka) and batch (Spark). Requirements: maintain current consent state with versioning, enforce opt-ins and opt-outs so processing respects consent changes (including retroactive opt-outs where applicable), scale to millions of events per minute, and produce audit logs showing enforcement. Sketch components and enforcement mechanisms.
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