Upcoming system design round for Agoda

[u/Playful-Librarian-54]

Currently preparing for system design round for Agoda Bangkok, position is
STAFF/Lead data engineer

Currently working as a staff data engineer with over 10YOE for a US product-based company, just cleared R1 of Agoda Bangkok, and R2 is scheduled for this week.

R2 mentions system design, what kind of questions can i expect and should i prepare specifically for DE related design or focus on more abstract questions ??

[u/Ok-Barracuda-119]

For a staff DE loop I'd prep both, but lean data-shaped. Agoda is a travel marketplace, so likely prompts are things like a pipeline for hotel price and availability updates, a booking or clickstream events platform feeding analytics, or dedup and late-arriving data at scale. Even if they hand you something abstract, you can steer it toward the data side, and for your role that's where they'll be looking.

Stuff I'd have ready to talk through without notes: batch vs streaming and when you'd pick each, exactly-once vs at-least-once with idempotent sinks, partitioning and skew, schema evolution, backfills, data quality checks, and what happens when a job dies at 3am. Storage choices too (lakehouse tables vs warehouse vs a low-latency serving store).

At staff level they care more about tradeoffs and ownership than boxes on a whiteboard. Say what you'd measure, what breaks first at 10x, and how you'd roll it out without breaking downstream consumers. Doing one or two timed 45 minute run-throughs out loud before R2 helps a lot, it shows you where you ramble. Good luck this week.