Design Catalog Update Pipeline
Company: Pinterest
Role: Software Engineer
Category: System Design
Difficulty: medium
Interview Round: Onsite
Design a system that takes a very large product catalog, for example 500 million records, and propagates updates to all downstream internal systems. Explain how to partition the work so processing can scale horizontally, how to coordinate delivery to multiple consumers, and how to handle failed partitions and retries safely.
Quick Answer: This question evaluates a candidate's ability to design scalable, fault-tolerant catalog update pipelines, including partitioning for horizontal scalability, coordination of delivery to multiple consumers, and safe handling of failed partitions and retries.