Prevent data registration outage and reduce loss
Overview
This question evaluates competency in production data reliability, monitoring and alerting, incident response, reconciliation, and cross-functional leadership for analytics pipelines.
Capital One
Oct 13, 2025, 9:49 PM
Data Scientist
Technical Screen
Behavioral & Leadership
0
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Preventing Silent Failures in the Premium Registration Pipeline
Context
A premium registration pipeline silently failed for three months, causing thousands of missed registrations and revenue loss. As the analytics lead partnering with engineering, propose a concrete prevention and mitigation plan to ensure this cannot recur and, if it does, impact is minimized.
Task
Design and justify a plan covering:
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SLIs/SLOs and Alerts
- Define end-to-end registration success rate, event lag/freshness, and daily registration volume vs. forecast.
- Include exact alert thresholds and time windows.
- Add synthetic canary registrations and enforce data contracts (schema, not-null/uniqueness, referential integrity).
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Architecture Changes
- Propose idempotent writes, retries with backoff, circuit breakers, dead-letter queues (DLQs), exactly-once or deduplicated semantics, reconciliation of app events to billing rows, and auto backfills.
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Dashboards, Runbooks, Postmortems
- Design monitoring dashboards (funnel, drop-off by stage, cohort view).
- Provide on-call runbooks and a blameless postmortem process.
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Impact Quantification and Validation
- Quantify expected reduction in affected users (e.g., from 6,000 to <300).
- Explain validation via drills and game days.
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30/60/90-Day Rollout
- Provide a phased rollout plan with clear ownership and key risks.
Solution
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