Mid

Build the self-serve batch/streaming data infrastructure powering Reddit's 100B+ daily events

Reddit's Data Movement team owns the platform that ingests over 100 billion events a day into a warehouse serving 55,000+ daily queries, using Spark, Flink, and Airflow. This interview focuses on large-scale data infrastructure design, self-service tooling instincts, and hands-on experience with the specific OSS stack.

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What this interview tests

Spark/Flink/Airflow data infrastructure
Self-service and automation tooling for data users
On-call and incident response for a data platform
Large-scale distributed systems design
Open-source contribution and collaboration

Common question themes

Tell me about infrastructure you built or extended using Spark, Flink, or Airflow

How would you design a self-service system that removes repetitive manual work for data users?

Walk me through an on-call incident on a data platform — how did you triage and what did you fix afterward?

How do you approach designing a large-scale system when requirements are ambiguous?

Have you contributed to an open-source project as part of your infrastructure work? Walk me through it

How candidates describe it

Real Software Engineer interview stories — retold from candidates' public write-ups, with sources.

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