Design a Metrics Ingestion Pipeline
Company: Microsoft
Role: Software Engineer
Category: System Design
Difficulty: medium
Interview Round: Onsite
Quick Answer: This question evaluates a candidate's ability to design a large-scale distributed system for ingesting time-series metrics at high throughput. It tests reasoning about write/read path separation, storage partitioning, label cardinality control, and graceful degradation under failure, commonly used to assess senior-to-principal-level system design skill.