Code Room
System designMediumsd-g187
Subject Data pipelinesLevel Mid–Senior~40 minCommon in Distributed systems interviewsIndustries Technology, Software development

Question

Design a multi-tenant customer-data-platform ingestion pipeline that receives event streams from thousands of customers (each a business) and routes/transforms/forwards each customer's events to that customer's chosen destinations (their warehouse, ad platforms, email tools) — fan-out of one event to up to 30 destinations. Per-customer volumes vary wildly (a few/sec to 50k/sec). One slow or failing destination for one customer must not back up or drop other customers' or other destinations' deliveries. Design ingestion, fan-out, and per-tenant/per-destination isolation.

What a strong answer looks like

Clarify scale and constraints first. Propose a clean component breakdown, then go deep on the hard parts — data model, bottlenecks, consistency, failure modes — and name the trade-offs you are making.

Narrate your design
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Run or narrate your approach, then ask the coach.