Data Engineer System Design Interview Questions

Practice 29 real System Design interview questions for Data Engineer roles. From companies including Meta, Jain Global, Disney, Figureai, xAI.

29 Questions 19 Companies08.03.2026
Showing 20 results
Role
Jain Global logo
Jain Global
Medium
Data Engineer

Design an Incremental Rolling-Metrics Data Pipeline

Design an Incremental Rolling-Metrics Data Pipeline Design a production pipeline that computes rolling-window metrics for approximately 1,000 tickers ...

System Design
3
0
26 people solved
Aug 3, 2026
Jain Global logo
Jain Global
Medium
Data Engineer

Model Effective-Dated Compliance Restrictions for Securities

Model Effective-Dated Compliance Restrictions for Securities Design a relational system that maps compliance restrictions to every affected security. ...

System Design
2
0
23 people solved
Jul 26, 2026
Jain Global logo
Jain Global
Medium
Data Engineer

Design and Debug a Point-in-Time Backtest Data Pipeline

Design and Debug a Point-in-Time Backtest Data Pipeline You own the data pipeline that feeds a quantitative backtest. The inputs include security iden...

System Design
1
0
14 people solved
Jul 26, 2026
xAI logo
xAI
Medium
Data Engineer Locked

Build a One-Pass Data Cleaning Pipeline

This question evaluates a candidate's competence in large-scale data engineering and system design, covering memory-bounded streaming IO, explainable ...

System Design
32
0
255 people solved
May 30, 2026
Cohere logo
Cohere
Medium
Data Engineer Locked

Design a Conversation Log Ingestion Pipeline

This question evaluates a data engineer's competency in designing robust daily ingestion and ETL pipelines for conversation logs, covering schema and ...

System Design
12
0
117 people solved
May 30, 2026
Baseten logo
Baseten
Medium
Data Engineer

Design a Data Pipeline for Messy Pod Alerts and Bad Pod Detection

Design a data system that turns messy pod alert history into structured signals and detects bad pods by comparing them to sibling replicas. `hint Hint...

System Design
8
0
57 people solved
May 4, 2026
Shopify logo
Shopify
Medium
Data Engineer

Choose Between Batch and Streaming for a Data Pipeline

Prompt The interview report mentioned detailed questions about the candidate's batch- and stream-processing experience, but it did not preserve an exa...

System Design
6
0
48 people solved
May 5, 2026
NVIDIA logo
NVIDIA
Medium
Data EngineerSenior+

Design a GPU Telemetry Collection and Analytics Platform

Design a platform that collects GPU telemetry from a large compute environment and exposes both high-level trend analytics and low-level drilldowns. T...

System Design
4
0
40 people solved
May 3, 2026
Point72 logo
Point72
Hard
Data Engineer

Design Data Quality and Observability Pipeline

Design a production data orchestration, data quality, and observability framework for batch and streaming data pipelines. Your design should address: ...

System Design
11
0
82 people solved
Apr 30, 2026
Zoox logo
Zoox
Medium
Data Engineer

Design teleoperations data models and pipelines

You work on a fully autonomous robotaxi service. Passengers can request rides, get picked up, and get dropped off. During trips, the robotaxis are con...

System Design
9
0
85 people solved
Apr 4, 2026
Discord logo
Discord
Hard
Data Engineer

Design Video Call Analytics Tables

You are building analytics tables for Discord video calls. Video-call activity is recorded from both client-side and server-side logs. Design a data m...

System Design
24
0
164 people solved
Apr 3, 2026
Figureai logo
Figureai
Medium
Data EngineerSenior+ Locked

Design a Telemetry Platform Ingesting Two Gigabytes per Second

Design a robotics telemetry platform handling two gigabytes of raw events per second. Reason through capacity, edge buffering, durable ingestion, repl...

System Design
2
0
24 people solved
May 20, 2026
Disney logo
Disney
Medium
Data Engineer

Design a clickstream ingestion and aggregation pipeline for billions of events per day

Design a clickstream ingestion and aggregation pipeline for billions of events per day You are designing the data platform for a large consumer stream...

System Design
9
0
127 people solved
Mar 27, 2026
Capital One logo
Capital One
Medium
Data Engineer

Evaluate credit-limit increase profitability

Business/Analytics Case: Credit Limit Increase Strategy You are a data scientist supporting a consumer credit business. Scenario The company is consid...

System Design
18
0
212 people solved
Mar 1, 2026
Nextdoor logo
Nextdoor
Hard
Data Engineer

Design KPI dashboard tables: retention, weekly rollups, timezone

Question You are designing the analytical data model behind a fast KPI dashboard for a large-scale photo-sharing app. The dashboard is reported daily ...

System Design
13
0
107 people solved
Feb 8, 2026
Meta logo
Meta
Hard
Data Engineer

Design batch and streaming ETL architecture

Design batch and streaming ETL architecture System Design: End-to-End Data Platform for Product Analytics (Batch + Near-Real-Time) Context Design a sc...

System Design
68
0
520 people solved
Jul 15, 2025
Notion logo
Notion
Medium
Data Engineer Locked

Design an event analytics platform

This question evaluates a candidate's skills in data engineering and system design for event analytics, covering platform architecture, data ingestion...

System Design
18
0
188 people solved
Apr 10, 2026
Otter.Ai logo
Otter.Ai
Medium
Data EngineerSenior+

Defend a Data Pipeline Architecture and Its Trade-offs

Prompt Choose one production data pipeline that you personally designed or substantially changed. Walk through its architecture, the requirements that...

System Design
0
0
16 people solved
Apr 2, 2026
xAI logo
xAI
Medium
Data Engineer

Design a schema for server engagement

You are building analytics for a chat platform similar to Discord. The raw event sources are: - server(server_id, creator_id, created_at) - server_vie...

System Design
14
0
116 people solved
Jan 17, 2026
Meta logo
Meta
Medium
Data Engineer Locked

Define metrics and data model for product features

This question evaluates a candidate's product sense and data engineering competency, including defining core success metrics, designing dashboard visu...

System Design
16
0
133 people solved
Mar 1, 2026

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