Real Data, Fake Patients

A hard Pipeline Design interview practice problem on DataDriven. Write and execute real pipeline design code with instant grading.

Domain

Pipeline Design

Difficulty

hard

Seniority

L6

Problem

Our data engineering team works with protected health information in production, and engineers need realistic data in a separate development account without ever touching real patient records. Design a scheduled pipeline that ingests from production and de-identifies PHI across many foreign-key-related tables, replacing stable identifiers with synthetic tokens drawn from a consistent mapping so the same real id always resolves to the same token in every table, and landing a statistically representative dataset in the dev account's object store. The mapping lives in a vault that feeds only the de-identification step and that engineers cannot read; an orchestrator coordinates each refresh through the tables in dependency order, clears every column through a classification check before anything reaches dev, and writes a durable per-run audit log retained for years to satisfy HIPAA.

Summary

Dev needs production data. HIPAA says absolutely not.

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