You need to deliver changes from a multi-terabyte production PostgreSQL database to an analytics warehouse with no more than five minutes of latency. How would you design this pipeline?
~10 min by voice
How to approach it
They're checking whether the candidate can build a reliable CDC pipeline. It matters that they understand the whole chain, from the transaction log to an idempotent merge in the warehouse, and that they see the operational risks for the production database: the snapshot, event ordering, delivery guarantees, WAL growth.
The interviewer will ask this question and listen. Think out loud and ask for a hint if you need one. When you're done, pause or tap “That's my answer”. In about a minute, your score and the points you covered show up here.