System design
System design interviews ask you to draw boxes under constraints: 500M events per day, a finance SLA, or a late-arriving CDC stream. Lakebench teaches the vocabulary and tradeoffs in a dedicated Learn track. No fake cluster grades a diagram.
Clarify volume, retention, and consumers first. Name ingest, storage, processing, serving, and observability. Compare batch vs streaming for the SLA. Call out idempotency, backfill, and cost (FinOps) before you add Kafka because it sounds modern.
After reading a design brief, fix a broken silver pipeline or tune a FinOps query in the studio. The job is both whiteboard architecture and on-call debugging.
Not sure where to begin?
Answer two questions and we'll point you at one first lesson and one free practice ticket.