Data Infrastructure and Contracts Questions

Covers the design and operational concerns of data pipelines and the contracts that govern producer and consumer expectations. Topics include event and batch pipelines, extract transform load patterns, streaming architectures, schema design and schema evolution, versioning, data contracts and consumer guarantees, data ownership and governance, testing and validation of pipelines, monitoring data quality and freshness, lineage and cataloging, trade offs between real time and batch processing, cost and performance considerations, and privacy and compliance implications. Candidates should be able to explain how to surface data issues, set onboarding standards for new data producers, and balance product needs with the operational burden of data systems.