Design a large-scale Data Pipeline Platform
Last updated: August 28, 2025
Quick Overview
Design a event-driven data pipeline system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Mastercard
August 28, 202595
9
1,691 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 Mastercard. 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. Mastercard values engineers who can think about scalability from day one.
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
- What would the deployment pipeline look like for this system?
- What monitoring and alerting would you set up on day one?
- How would you migrate from a monolithic to a microservices architecture?
- What happens if one of your database nodes goes down?
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Requirements
Functional Requirements
- Event Ingestion: The system must ingest millions of events per second from various sources (e.g., payment transactions, user activity).
- Real-Time Processing: ...
Capacity Estimation
Assuming Mastercard processes approximately 1 billion transactions per day, we can estimate the following:
- Transactions per second (TPS): 1 billion / (24 * 60 * 60) = ~11,574 TPS.
- **Event Siz...
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