A clickstream pipeline at a streaming company suffered a six-hour outage
A medium Pipeline Design mock interview question on DataDriven. Practice with AI-powered feedback, real code execution, and a hire/no-hire decision.
- Domain
- Pipeline Design
- Difficulty
- medium
Interview Prompt
A clickstream pipeline at a streaming company suffered a six-hour outage. A Geo-IP service deployed a config change that increased p99 latency from 80ms to 4 seconds. The pipeline had no retry policy on the Geo-IP call, no circuit breaker, no DLQ, and no backpressure on Kafka beyond retention. Three hours of data was permanently lost when Kafka retention dropped messages that could not be enriched. Trace the postmortem by adding the four missing patterns the section names so the next latency spike is bounded.
How This Interview Works
- Read the vague prompt (just like a real interview)
- Ask clarifying questions to the AI interviewer
- Write your pipeline design solution with real code execution
- Get instant feedback and a hire/no-hire decision