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This is a hard difficulty System Design question, commonly asked during Onsite rounds at Netflix.

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This question is commonly asked for Software Engineer candidates at Netflix during technical interviews.

Model advertiser intake database schema | Netflix Interview Question

Quick Overview

This question evaluates database and system design skills, focusing on data modeling for multi-tenant advertiser and campaign hierarchies, ERD-level schema design with composite keys and parent-child locality, plus operational concerns such as billing, approvals, auditability, versioning, and normalization trade-offs.

Advertiser Intake and Campaign Data Model (F1-style)

Context

You are designing a multi-tenant advertiser intake and campaign configuration system. The system must cleanly model advertisers and their campaigns, enable hierarchical configuration (organization → account → campaign → ad group → creative), and support operational needs such as approvals, auditability, and billing. The schema should be amenable to an F1/Spanner-style hierarchical layout (composite keys, parent-child locality), but also work in a standard RDBMS.

Requirements

Model core entities and relationships:
- Organization, account, user/seat (and account membership/roles)
- Campaign, ad group, creative (with assets)
- Budget and flighting (by campaign/ad group as applicable)
- Targeting (geo, device, audience, exclusions, etc.)
- Frequency-cap policy (campaign/ad group scope)
- Billing (billing profile, invoices, invoice lines, spend ledger)
- Approvals (for onboarding and configuration changes)
Provide ERD-level tables with primary/foreign keys and key fields.
Discuss:
- Normalization vs. denormalization (read/write trade-offs)
- Multi-tenancy and row-level security
- Configuration versioning and auditability
- Soft deletes
- Idempotent imports
- How the schema supports validation and partial onboarding (drafts, checklists)

Deliverables

ERD-level table definitions (names, primary keys, foreign keys, key columns) in a hierarchical, F1-friendly fashion (composite keys) or an equivalent approach for a traditional RDBMS.
A brief rationale for key design decisions and operational considerations.

Quick Overview

Context

Requirements

Model core entities and relationships:

Organization, account, user/seat (and account membership/roles)
Campaign, ad group, creative (with assets)
Budget and flighting (by campaign/ad group as applicable)
Targeting (geo, device, audience, exclusions, etc.)
Frequency-cap policy (campaign/ad group scope)
Billing (billing profile, invoices, invoice lines, spend ledger)
Approvals (for onboarding and configuration changes)

Provide ERD-level tables with primary/foreign keys and key fields.

Discuss:

Normalization vs. denormalization (read/write trade-offs)
Multi-tenancy and row-level security
Configuration versioning and auditability
Soft deletes
Idempotent imports
How the schema supports validation and partial onboarding (drafts, checklists)

Model advertiser intake database schema

Quick Overview

Advertiser Intake and Campaign Data Model (F1-style)

Context

Requirements

Deliverables

Solution

Comments (0)

Model advertiser intake database schema

Quick Overview

Advertiser Intake and Campaign Data Model (F1-style)

Context

Requirements

Deliverables

Solution

Comments (0)