Design a job orchestration system
A company runs ~2000 interdependent data jobs as a DAG: a late or failed upstream job cascades into hundreds of downstream tables missing their morning SLA, and on-call wastes hours figuring out which root failure caused the storm of downstream alerts. Jobs have different priorities (a few are board-report-critical, most are not). Design an orchestration system that models dependencies, handles failures and retries sensibly, prioritizes critical paths, and gives clear SLA/root-cause visibility instead of alert storms.
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.
Clarify4:30 left
Estimate4:30 planned
Design13:30 planned
Deep dive10:30 planned
Failure7:00 planned
Which questions mattered is sealed until you submit. Telling you now would just be handing over the edge cases.
Run or narrate your approach, then ask the coach.