The Queue That Wouldn't Stop Growing
A medium Pipeline Design mock interview question on DataDriven, with an AI interviewer who asks follow-up questions and a hire or no-hire decision at the end.
- Domain
- Pipeline Design
- Difficulty
- medium
- Seniority
- L5
Interview Prompt
Your streaming video event pipeline shows consumer lag spiking from near-zero to over 500,000 messages within two hours. You need to diagnose whether the cause is a producer burst or a consumer slowdown, then design a monitoring and auto-remediation system that can detect, alert on, and automatically recover from future lag events.
Summary
500,000 messages behind and the number keeps climbing.
How This Interview Works
- Read the vague prompt (just like a real interview)
- Ask clarifying questions to the AI interviewer
- Draw your pipeline on the design canvas: sources, transforms, storage and checks
- Answer the interviewer's follow-up questions, then get a hire or no-hire decision