Data Lake Architecture for Data Engineering Interviews

Data lake architecture questions in data-engineering interviews almost always reduce to four primitives: medallion zones (bronze → silver → gold) for progressive refinement, an ingestion → metadata catalog → compute flow on object storage, the lake vs cloud warehouse vs lakehouse decision driven by open table formats (Iceberg, Delta, Hudi), and a disciplined answer shape that covers grain, idempotency, lineage, and aggregate reconciliation . Whether the prompt is "design our analytics lake from