Design a regulatory reporting and compliance data pipeline
Last updated: August 6, 2025
Quick Overview
Design a data pipeline that collects lending data across all Affirm products, transforms it for regulatory reporting (state-level lending reports, fair lending analyses, TILA disclosures), and delivers reports on mandated schedules with full audit trails.
Affirm
August 6, 20255
6
4,848 solved
Design a data pipeline that collects lending data across all Affirm products, transforms it for regulatory reporting (state-level lending reports, fair lending analyses, TILA disclosures), and delivers reports on mandated schedules with full audit trails.
As a regulated lender, Affirm must submit accurate reports to state and federal regulators on strict schedules. This question tests whether you can design data infrastructure that meets compliance requirements while handling the complexity of data from multiple lending products.
What the Interviewer Expects
- Design a data pipeline that aggregates lending data from multiple source systems
- Handle data quality validation and reconciliation before report generation
- Support multiple report formats and delivery schedules per regulatory body
- Ensure complete audit trails showing data lineage from source to report
- Design for data corrections and amended report submissions
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 handle a data quality issue discovered after a report has been submitted?
- How do you ensure the pipeline processes data exactly once?
- How would you add a new regulatory report type without disrupting existing ones?
- How do you handle schema changes in source systems?
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Practice System Design ProblemsSample Answer
Requirements
Functional Requirements
- Data Aggregation: Collect lending data from various Affirm products (like BNPL, loans, etc.) and consolidate them.
- Data Transformation: Process this data to m...
Capacity Estimation
Assuming Affirm processes approximately 5 million transactions monthly across all products:
- Data Volume: Each transaction averages 2 KB, leading to a monthly data volume of 10 TB.
- **Daily Proc...
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