Build a event-driven Data Pipeline Pipeline
Last updated: April 1, 2026
Quick Overview
Design a event-driven data pipeline system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
OpenAI
April 1, 2026108
8
3,450 solved
Design a event-driven data pipeline system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
This is a common system design question asked during Onsite at OpenAI. The interviewer expects you to demonstrate your ability to design large-scale distributed systems, make well-reasoned trade-offs, and communicate your thought process clearly. OpenAI values engineers who can think about scalability from day one.
What the Interviewer Expects
- Systematically gather requirements and estimate capacity (QPS, storage, bandwidth)
- Design a scalable architecture with clear component responsibilities
- Make well-reasoned database and caching decisions with trade-off analysis
- Address consistency vs availability trade-offs specific to the use case
- Discuss partitioning strategy, replication, and data modeling
- Cover failure handling, monitoring, and alerting strategies
Key Topics to Cover
How to Approach This
- Start by clarifying functional and non-functional requirements with the interviewer.
- Estimate the scale: QPS, storage, bandwidth. This drives your design decisions.
- Draw a high-level architecture first, then deep dive into 1-2 critical components.
- Discuss trade-offs explicitly (e.g., consistency vs availability, SQL vs NoSQL).
- Address failure scenarios, monitoring, and how the system handles 10x traffic spikes.
Possible Follow-up Questions
- How would you implement rate limiting to protect the system?
- How would you handle schema migrations with zero downtime?
- How would you optimize costs as the system scales?
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Requirements
Functional Requirements:
- Event Ingestion: The system should be able to ingest events from multiple sources, such as APIs, user interactions, and external data feeds.
- **Real-time Processi...
Capacity Estimation
Assuming OpenAI expects to handle approximately 5 million events per day, let’s break this down:
-
Events per Second (EPS):
- Total events per second = 5 million events/day ÷ 86,400 seconds...
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