Design
Distributed Job Scheduler (Airflow-like)
Design a distributed system for scheduling and executing DAGs of interdependent jobs across a cluster of workers.
This is a Low-Level Design (LLD) problem. New to LLD vs HLD? Start here.
01 - Why interviewers ask this
It's a from-scratch mini-Airflow — interviewers check whether you understand leader election and exactly-once task claiming, not just "a cron job on a bigger machine".
02 - Where this system exists in the real world
You interact with this design every day.
Airflow / Temporal-style workflow orchestrators
Distributed ETL and data pipeline schedulers
Enterprise batch-job orchestration systems
03 - What you'll master
Solve this once. Know it forever.
Design DAG-based task dependency execution
Use leader election for scheduler fault tolerance
Implement claim-with-lease for exactly-once execution
04 - What you'll design
6 functional · 3 non-functional requirements.
Define a job as a DAG of tasks with dependencies
5 more requirements inside
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05 - Companies that ask this
You may face this exact question in your next interview.
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