Code RoomSchema evolution governance
MediumPrep Room Coding #3545

Schema evolution governance

System designDistributed systemsMid–Senior~35 min

Design schema governance for an event platform with ~600 Avro/Protobuf event types flowing through Kafka, where producers and consumers are owned by ~80 independent teams that deploy on their own cadence. Today, a producer adding a required field or changing a type silently breaks consumers, causing deserialization storms and dropped events discovered hours later. Design a system that lets producers evolve schemas safely without lock-step coordination, while guaranteeing existing consumers keep working.

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.

Clarify4:00 left
Estimate4:00 planned
Design11:30 planned
Deep dive9:30 planned
Failure6:00 planned
0:00
Which questions mattered is sealed until you submit. Telling you now would just be handing over the edge cases.