"How Does Your Pipeline Handle Bad Data?"

What They're Really Testing The Unlock A DLQ is not an error log. It is a parallel processing path. Good records flow through the main pipeline. Bad records are diverted to the DLQ with the full error context (original record, error message, stack trace, timestamp, retry count). The DLQ is a queue, not a graveyard. Records in it are expected to be replayed after the root cause is fixed. The 60-Second Framework This five-step flow takes 60 seconds to articulate and hits every rubric item: error classification, retry strategy, isolation, monitoring, and recovery. Most candidates stop at step 3. Steps 4 and 5 are the strong-hire signals. Why Companies Care At Uber, a malformed ride event caused a Kafka consumer to crash-loop for 4 hours, blocking 200,000 subsequent events from processing. A D