A dbt project's CI rebuilds every model on every PR
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 dbt project's CI rebuilds every model on every PR. Engineers stopped running CI locally because it takes 45 minutes; they push and watch it fail in GitHub. The section names four CI test layers (code, logic, schema/contracts, integration) and the slim-CI optimization: build only the models that changed plus their downstream descendants, against a deferred dev warehouse, with teardown after the PR closes. Design the test plan by replacing the CI step with a slim-CI runner whose name states the four test layers, the changed-models-plus-descendants selector, the deferred dev warehouse, and the teardown.
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