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Surge Pricing and Dynamic Pricing System Design Questions

Design considerations for building a scalable, low-latency surge pricing engine and dynamic pricing system within a distributed architecture. Covers data modeling for pricing rules, real-time computation, demand/supply signal integration, multi-region consistency, latency and throughput requirements, caching and cache invalidation strategies, event-driven and microservices approaches, fault tolerance, data synchronization with inventory and orders, feature flags and A/B testing, deployment strategies, monitoring, and reliability concerns.

EasyTechnical
0 practiced
Explain how you would model pricing rules and metadata for a dynamic pricing engine. Provide a concise schema or data model (fields and types) for a 'pricing_rule' entity that supports: time windows, geographic scope, weighted demand signals, minimum/maximum multipliers, and versioning for safe rollouts.
EasyTechnical
0 practiced
Describe three straightforward fault-tolerance patterns a pricing API should implement to remain available during partial failures (e.g., regional outage, downstream model store failure). For each pattern, note pros/cons and recovery behaviors.
HardTechnical
0 practiced
Design an idempotent pricing evaluation API that guarantees the same price is returned for duplicate requests with identical context, even under retries. Discuss idempotency tokens, TTL for tokens, storage trade-offs, and implications for stateless evaluators at scale.
HardTechnical
0 practiced
You need to demonstrate a POC during a sales cycle showing <50ms price latency for 10k RPS from a customer region. Outline an end-to-end POC architecture, minimal dataset needed, synthetic load approach, and how you'd measure and present results to the customer.
EasyTechnical
0 practiced
Define key latency and throughput SLOs you would propose for a global dynamic-pricing API that must return a price to a client app within 50ms at peak load of 20,000 requests/second per region. Include P95/P99 targets, expected error budget, and how these SLOs influence architecture decisions.

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