Liv delivered a well-structured presentation with impressive breadth, systematically addressing all requirements while exploring technical implications in depth. She excelled at articulating trade-offs, thoughtfully weighing competing factors like performance versus complexity and short-term costs against long-term maintainability, demonstrating mature engineering judgment.

Her  time management and communication were effective—covering all critical topics without rushing or losing focus. Most notably, Liv consistently connected architectural decisions to their impact on system reliability and scalability, showing strong systems-thinking by linking design choices to operational concerns like handling growth, maintaining uptime, and failure recovery.

Areas of Strength

• Enumerated all functional and non-functional requirements clearly
• Proactively identified scheduler bottlenecks
• Proactively addressed fault tolerance mechanisms and retry policy design
• Proactively drove deep-dive technical discussions
• Partition build logs into chunks and stream real-time output to clients

Areas for Improvement

• Pipeline Configuration Schema: Define standardized YAML structure for pipeline definitions and stage relationships, talk more about how to model retry, and failures.
• Dependency Management: Implement dependency tracking and resolution within pipeline YAML configurations

Suggestions

To strengthen future System Design Interview, consider keeping the high-level design portion more strategic and abstract. Focus on:

• System boundaries and major components rather than implementation details
• Key architectural patterns and principles (e.g., event-driven, microservices, layered architecture)
• Critical decision points and their business/technical rationale
• System-wide concerns like data flow, service interactions, and failure modes

After presenting the high-level view, explicitly offer targeted deep dives such as:

• "I can elaborate on the data consistency model if that's of interest"
• "Would you like to explore the caching strategy in more detail?"
• "I'm happy to dive deeper into the scaling approach for the write path"
• "We could discuss the failover mechanism and disaster recovery if needed"

This approach keeps the main presentation focused while demonstrating command of technical depth and giving interviewers control over where to probe further. It also signals strong communication skills and awareness of audience needs.