Design a large-scale Data Pipeline Platform
Last updated: September 24, 2025
Quick Overview
Design a multi-tenant data pipeline system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Two Sigma
System Design
Software Engineer
Two Sigma
September 24, 2025Software Engineer
Technical Screen
System Design
Hard
6
13
1,876 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 Two Sigma 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
- Drive the design discussion proactively with minimal interviewer guidance
- Perform detailed capacity estimation and use it to inform design decisions
- Design for global scale with multi-region deployment and data consistency
- Deep dive into 2-3 critical components with implementation-level detail
- Address complex trade-offs: CAP theorem, eventual consistency, conflict resolution
- Discuss operational excellence: deployment strategy, chaos engineering, SLOs/SLIs
- Propose a phased rollout plan from MVP to full-scale system
Key Topics to Cover
API design and rate limiting
Failure handling and fault tolerance
High-level architecture and component design
Load balancing and horizontal scaling
Requirements gathering and capacity estimation
Consistency models and replication
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 handle a 10x increase in traffic overnight?
- How do you ensure data consistency across multiple services?
- How would you migrate from a monolithic to a microservices architecture?
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Requirements
Functional Requirements
- Multi-Tenant Support: The system must support multiple clients (tenants) while isolating their data and processing.
- Data Ingestion: Ability to ingest data fro...
Capacity Estimation
Estimation Breakdown
- Total Clients: Assume 1000 tenants.
- Average Data Requests per Tenant: 100 requests per second (RPS).
- Peak Load: 10x the average during peak hours, leading to...
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