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Design an hourly weather crawling service

Last updated: Mar 29, 2026

Quick Overview

This question evaluates a candidate's ability to design scalable, reliable data ingestion and delivery systems, covering competencies such as scheduling and crawling, data normalization, storage schema design, idempotent ingestion, rate limiting, retries, and monitoring.

  • easy
  • HubSpot
  • System Design
  • Software Engineer

Design an hourly weather crawling service

Company: HubSpot

Role: Software Engineer

Category: System Design

Difficulty: easy

Interview Round: Onsite

## Scenario Design a service that **crawls the U.S. National Weather Service (or a similar public provider)** and provides **hourly weather data** to internal consumers (and optionally an external API). ## Requirements ### Functional 1. Fetch weather data **hourly** for all supported locations (e.g., stations or grid points). 2. Normalize provider responses into an internal schema. 3. Store historical data for querying and analytics. 4. Expose data to clients via an API (or data export) with predictable freshness. ### Non-functional - Respect provider constraints (rate limits, robots/terms). - High reliability with retries/backoff. - Idempotent ingestion (avoid duplicates). - Monitoring and alerting on missing/late data. ## Assumptions (you may refine) - 10,000 locations. - Each location updates once per hour. - Provider endpoints may be flaky and occasionally return partial data. ## Deliverables 1. Architecture for scheduling and crawling 2. Storage and schema 3. Freshness guarantees and backfill strategy 4. Rate limiting, retries, and idempotency 5. Monitoring, alerting, and data quality checks

Quick Answer: This question evaluates a candidate's ability to design scalable, reliable data ingestion and delivery systems, covering competencies such as scheduling and crawling, data normalization, storage schema design, idempotent ingestion, rate limiting, retries, and monitoring.

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HubSpot logo
HubSpot
Dec 15, 2025, 12:00 AM
Software Engineer
Onsite
System Design
18
0

Scenario

Design a service that crawls the U.S. National Weather Service (or a similar public provider) and provides hourly weather data to internal consumers (and optionally an external API).

Requirements

Functional

  1. Fetch weather data hourly for all supported locations (e.g., stations or grid points).
  2. Normalize provider responses into an internal schema.
  3. Store historical data for querying and analytics.
  4. Expose data to clients via an API (or data export) with predictable freshness.

Non-functional

  • Respect provider constraints (rate limits, robots/terms).
  • High reliability with retries/backoff.
  • Idempotent ingestion (avoid duplicates).
  • Monitoring and alerting on missing/late data.

Assumptions (you may refine)

  • 10,000 locations.
  • Each location updates once per hour.
  • Provider endpoints may be flaky and occasionally return partial data.

Deliverables

  1. Architecture for scheduling and crawling
  2. Storage and schema
  3. Freshness guarantees and backfill strategy
  4. Rate limiting, retries, and idempotency
  5. Monitoring, alerting, and data quality checks

Solution

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