System Design for Data Engineers: Design Scalable Data Systems, Pipelines, Lakehouses & Cloud Architectures for Real-World Projects and Interviews

By: Mondal, Masud

Master Data Engineering System Design - From Fundamentals to Real-World Production Systems

System design interviews trip up data engineers who are strong on execution but have never been shown how to structure a complete architectural answer. This book fixes that gap - and gives you the production knowledge to back it up.

What you will learn:

How to approach any system design question using a six-step framework that works every timeThe fundamentals of distributed systems: CAP theorem, replication, partitioning, consistency models, and message delivery guaranteesHow to design batch pipelines, streaming pipelines, and CDC architectures from scratchModern data architectures: data warehouse (Kimball, Inmon, Medallion), data lake (Bronze/Silver/Gold), and lakehouse (Delta Lake, Iceberg, Hudi)AWS, Azure, and GCP data services - and how to combine them into production-ready platformsFive complete real-world case studies: Uber GPS platform, Netflix analytics, e-commerce data platform, real-time fraud detection, and an AI/ML platform with feature store and RAG20 most-asked system design interview questions with full answers, architectures, and common mistakesWhere data engineering is heading: AI-assisted pipelines, the real-time lakehouse, vector databases, and Data Mesh

Who this book is for:

Junior to mid-level data engineers preparing for system design interviewsData engineering beginners who want to understand how components fit together into real systemsCollege students and freshers entering the data engineering fieldProfessionals moving from analytics or software engineering into data engineering

Every chapter follows a consistent structure: core concepts, real-world examples, architecture diagrams, common mistakes, and interview questions. The writing is practitioner-level - no academic jargon, short paragraphs, and honest trade-off discussions throughout.

This is a standalone book. No prior system design experience required - only a basic familiarity with SQL and Python.

Topics covered: system design fundamentals - scalability - distributed systems - OLTP vs OLAP - data modeling - star schema - SCD Type 2 - storage formats - Parquet - Avro - Delta Lake - Apache Iceberg - batch pipelines - Airflow - streaming pipelines - Apache Kafka - Flink - CDC - Debezium - data warehouse - data lake - lakehouse - AWS - Azure - GCP - Redshift - Snowflake - BigQuery - feature store - RAG - vector databases - fraud detection - A/B testing - interview framework

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0H6GVKTMM
• ISBN13: 9798183934342
• Release Date: June 2026
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 310 Pages
• Weight: 0.92 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.0" x 9.0"