Interview prompt
Problem context
A global AI API sells request and compute-token quotas to millions of customers. Traffic enters six regions, work cost is known only after partial execution, and a single global counter would add latency and fail under partition. Enterprise plans require reserved capacity while free traffic may be shed.
Skills being evaluated
distributed quota designfairness policyapproximation boundscommercial architecture
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Clarify the decision
Establish scale assumptions
Functional and non-functional requirements
High-level architecture
Data model and flow
Consistency and transaction boundaries
Failure modes and recovery
Security and privacy
Observability and SLOs
Capacity and cost
Alternatives and trade-offs
Evolution and migration
What Staff and Principal candidates should emphasize