#data pipelines

10 data pipelines interview questions, asked at Amazon, Apple, Baseten and 7 more companies. Last asked Sep 2026.

Design the data flow behind a food delivery restaurant listSystem designWhen a customer opens a food delivery app with a delivery address, the home screen lists the restaurants that can deliver there. Design how restaurant data travels from the…
Last asked Sep 2026
Load daily LLM chat logs into a warehouse idempotentlySystem designEvery day one JSONL file of LLM conversations lands in object storage; each line is a conversation with an id, a user id, its messages and metadata. Design the job that loads it…
Last asked Sep 2026
Keep GPUs fed: fix a training job that waits on its dataML designA training job's GPUs sit idle a third of the time waiting for the next batch. How do you prove the input pipeline is the bottleneck, and then fix it? Cover profiling, parallel…
Last asked Sep 2026
Migrate 200 TB of media and feed it to trainingML designMove about 200 terabytes of media files to new storage and build the input pipeline that streams them to model training. Cover how you copy that much data reliably (parallelism…
Last asked Aug 2026
Data platform and pipeline operations deep diveSystem designAfter a short coding warm-up, discuss running production data pipelines: streaming ingestion, metrics and alerting, idempotent reprocessing, batch jobs on Spark, and how you keep…
Last asked Jul 2026
Design a fleet system that collects mapping dataSystem designDesign the system behind a fleet of sensor-equipped vehicles whose job is to collect data for building and refreshing maps. Cover how mapping needs (new areas, stale areas) become…
Last asked Jun 2026
Design a pipeline that cleans pod alerts and finds bad podsSystem designAlerts about Kubernetes pods arrive messy: inconsistent formats, duplicates and noise. Design the data pipeline that ingests and cleans them and uses the result to flag pods that…
Last asked May 2026
Post ingestion and LLM scoring pipeline take-homeCodingOver a few hours, build a small pipeline that loads a public dataset of social posts, validates each record against a schema, stores them locally, and runs a worker that sends…
Last asked Jan 2026
Design a multi-tenant data ingestion and processing platformSystem designDesign a platform that many customer teams use to ingest data and run processing on it. Cover the ingestion APIs, how each tenant's data and workloads are isolated, fair sharing…
Last asked Jan 2026
Design Mint.comSystem designLink users' bank and card accounts, pull and categorize transactions daily, and show budgets and spending trends, keeping credentials safe.
Last asked Aug 2025