Design a large-scale Data Pipeline Platform
Last updated: February 26, 2026
Quick Overview
Design a multi-tenant data pipeline system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Expedia
February 26, 2026135
14
3,988 solved
Design a multi-tenant data pipeline system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
System design interviews at Expedia typically last 45-60 minutes. You are expected to drive the conversation, starting from requirements gathering through to a detailed architecture. The interviewer will evaluate your ability to handle ambiguity and make practical engineering decisions.
What the Interviewer Expects
- Clearly define functional and non-functional requirements
- Propose a reasonable high-level architecture with core components
- Choose appropriate data storage solutions with basic justification
- Discuss basic scaling strategies (horizontal scaling, caching)
- Identify potential bottlenecks and suggest simple solutions
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?
- What would the deployment pipeline look like for this system?
- How would you handle a region-wide outage?
Practice a Similar Problem on Codemia
Solve a related problem with our interactive workspace, get AI feedback, and view detailed solutions.
Solve on CodemiaSample Answer
Requirements
Functional Requirements
- Multi-Tenant Support: The system must support multiple tenants, ensuring data segregation and access control.
- Data Ingestion: Ability to ingest data from vari...
Capacity Estimation
Assuming Expedia handles around 100 million users annually and each user generates approximately 10 data events per session, we can estimate:
- Daily Events: 100 million users x 10 events/user = 1...
Submit Your Answer
