Design a Data Pipeline Service
Last updated: November 22, 2025
Quick Overview
Design a low-latency data pipeline system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Zillow
System Design
Software Engineer
Zillow
November 22, 2025Software Engineer
Onsite
System Design
Medium
101
13
821 solved
Design a low-latency data pipeline system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Zillow asks this during the Onsite 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
Security and authentication
Requirements gathering and capacity estimation
Database selection and data modeling
Load balancing and horizontal scaling
Monitoring, logging, and alerting
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 do you ensure data consistency across multiple services?
- What would the deployment pipeline look like for this system?
- How would you handle schema migrations with zero downtime?
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Requirements
Functional Requirements:
- Real-time Data Ingestion: The pipeline should support ingestion of property listing updates, user interactions, and market trends in real-time.
- **Data Transforma...
Capacity Estimation
Back-of-Envelope Calculations:
- Requests Per Second (QPS):
- Assuming 10 million requests per day: 10,000,000 / 86400 seconds = ~115.74 QPS.
- During peak hours, the traffic may increase ...
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