Design a CI/CD Pipeline

Q: Design a CI/CD Pipeline

This question evaluates expertise in designing scalable, secure end-to-end CI/CD platforms, covering skills in build orchestration, artifact management, automated testing pipelines, deployment strategies, rollback and observability, security and compliance gating, and operational scalability; it is categorized under System Design and assesses both high-level architectural (conceptual) reasoning and practical operational design. It is commonly asked to measure a candidate's ability to articulate trade-offs around reliability, cost, developer velocity, and compliance while describing data/control flow, guardrails, and global-scale deployment considerations in cloud-native environments.

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Question

System Design: End-to-End CI/CD Pipeline for a Large-Scale Engineering Org

Context

You are designing a CI/CD platform for a large engineering organization with many teams and services. Assume:

100+ services (polyglot: backend, frontend, data/ML, infra-as-code)
Cloud-native target (Kubernetes and managed services), with some VM workloads
Need for strong security, auditability, and reliability (e.g., SOC2/ISO-style expectations)
High developer throughput and global scale

Design a reference CI/CD system and explain key decisions and trade-offs.

Requirements

Discuss the following dimensions:

Source control integration and branch strategy
Build orchestration and artifact management
Automated testing stages (unit, integration, E2E) and test parallelism
Containerization vs. VM builds; reproducible environments
Deployment strategies (blue-green, canary, rolling, feature flags)
Rollback, observability, and incident response hooks
Security scanning, secrets management, and compliance gates
Scalability, cost efficiency, and high availability of the CI/CD platform

Provide a high-level architecture, data/control flow, and the guardrails you would enforce.

Design a CI/CD Pipeline

System Design: End-to-End CI/CD Pipeline for a Large-Scale Engineering Org

Context

Requirements

Solution

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