Three failures on the canvas should not be retried
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
Three failures on the canvas should not be retried. A validation failure (a required field missing from an event) sees the same missing field on attempt two. An authentication failure (HTTP 401) keeps failing with the same wrong credential and can lock the account out. A poison pill (a Kafka message that crashes the worker every time it is pulled) loops forever, blocking every other downstream message behind it. The section's rule: if retrying does not change anything between attempts, retrying is the wrong tool. Add three terminal destinations downstream of the worker, one per failure type, so the queue keeps flowing.
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