Design real-time exchange data sync system
Company: Coinbase
Role: Software Engineer
Category: System Design
Difficulty: hard
Interview Round: Onsite
Design a system that continuously ingests and syncs stock data from multiple exchanges and renders an always up-to-date web page. Cover data sources (polling vs. streaming), schema normalization, deduplication, handling time zones and out-of-order events, caching and storage, API design, client updates (WebSocket/SSE), consistency and latency targets, fault tolerance and backfill, rate limiting, scaling and partitioning, observability, security, and cost considerations.
Quick Answer: This question evaluates skills in system design for real-time, multi-source market data ingestion and live streaming, covering competencies such as schema normalization, deduplication and idempotency, time-ordering, API and client update models, partitioning and scaling, fault tolerance and backfill, observability, security, and cost management.