An engineer is renaming a column on fct_orders
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
An engineer is renaming a column on fct_orders. Without lineage they have no way to know who breaks; without lineage, an engineer debugging a wrong number on the revenue dashboard has no way to know which pipeline to inspect first. The section's two reads of lineage: forward (if this changes, what else changes; the blast radius) and backward (what produced this; the root cause). Sources include the dbt manifest.json (parsed at compile time), query history (observed at runtime), and OpenLineage events (cross-tool). Trace the blast radius by adding a lineage catalog downstream of the dbt build that captures column-level provenance, plus a lineage-query consumer that reads it forward and backward.
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