Build a scalable Data Pipeline Pipeline
Last updated: October 21, 2025
Quick Overview
Design a scalable data pipeline system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
OpenAI
October 21, 202527
14
2,481 solved
Design a scalable data pipeline system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
OpenAI asks this during the System Design Round to assess your architectural thinking. They want to see how you decompose a complex problem, choose appropriate technologies, and reason about failure modes. Strong candidates proactively discuss monitoring, alerting, and operational concerns.
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 optimize costs as the system scales?
- What would the deployment pipeline look like for this system?
- How would you migrate from a monolithic to a microservices architecture?
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Requirements
Functional Requirements
- Data Ingestion: The system must handle millions of requests per second (QPS) for various data types (text, images, etc.).
- Data Processing: The pipeline should...
Capacity Estimation
Assuming the system needs to handle 1 million requests per second (QPS) at peak.
Back-of-Envelope Calculations:
- Requests per Day: 1,000,000 QPS * 60 seconds * 60 minutes * 24 hours = 86,400...
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