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Design a natural-disaster notification system
Design a Natural-Disaster Notification System
You are tasked with designing a system to notify hosts and guests of a vacation-rental platform about natural disasters that impact their bookings or properties.
Available Data Sources / APIs:
- Third-party disaster API: Provides information on impacted regions, incident types (wildfire, flood, earthquake), and can be queried periodically.
- Geo API: Assists in constructing, normalizing, simplifying, and validating geographical shapes (polygons).
- Internal APIs / Data: Access to property details (location, address, status), host information, guest information, and booking data (dates, property ID, guest contact).
Core Problems:
- Efficiently identify properties within impacted geographical areas: Given potentially large, numerous, and dynamic disaster polygons, find all affected properties.
- Identify impacted bookings: For affected properties, determine bookings that overlap with the disaster's time window.
- Send timely and reliable notifications: Alert hosts and guests via email, SMS, or push notifications, ensuring deduplication and the ability to re-notify on significant updates.
Requirements:
- Scale: Handle millions of properties and numerous concurrent incidents.
- Accuracy: Minimize missed impacted properties and reduce false positives.
- Timeliness: Achieve near-real-time notifications or meet defined Service Level Objectives (SLOs) for delay.
- Reliability: Implement retries, idempotency, and an audit trail.
- API and Data Design: Define schemas and endpoints for storing and managing incidents and polygons.
- Trade-offs: Discuss choices like batch vs. streaming processing, precomputation vs. on-demand calculations.
- Testing and Monitoring: Outline strategies for verifying system correctness and operational health.
AI interview prep
Core dilemma
Balancing the computational complexity of large-scale geospatial intersection queries against the need for timely, accurate, and reliable notifications for millions of users and properties.
Mid-level signals3
Senior signals3
Red flags3
3 tradeoffs and 3 stress tests locked
Interview prep
Unlock the interviewer X-Ray rubric, tradeoff matrix, stress tests, clarifying questions, and key concepts.
Design a natural-disaster notification system
Design a Natural-Disaster Notification System
You are tasked with designing a system to notify hosts and guests of a vacation-rental platform about natural disasters that impact their bookings or properties.
Available Data Sources / APIs:
- Third-party disaster API: Provides information on impacted regions, incident types (wildfire, flood, earthquake), and can be queried periodically.
- Geo API: Assists in constructing, normalizing, simplifying, and validating geographical shapes (polygons).
- Internal APIs / Data: Access to property details (location, address, status), host information, guest information, and booking data (dates, property ID, guest contact).
Core Problems:
- Efficiently identify properties within impacted geographical areas: Given potentially large, numerous, and dynamic disaster polygons, find all affected properties.
- Identify impacted bookings: For affected properties, determine bookings that overlap with the disaster's time window.
- Send timely and reliable notifications: Alert hosts and guests via email, SMS, or push notifications, ensuring deduplication and the ability to re-notify on significant updates.
Requirements:
- Scale: Handle millions of properties and numerous concurrent incidents.
- Accuracy: Minimize missed impacted properties and reduce false positives.
- Timeliness: Achieve near-real-time notifications or meet defined Service Level Objectives (SLOs) for delay.
- Reliability: Implement retries, idempotency, and an audit trail.
- API and Data Design: Define schemas and endpoints for storing and managing incidents and polygons.
- Trade-offs: Discuss choices like batch vs. streaming processing, precomputation vs. on-demand calculations.
- Testing and Monitoring: Outline strategies for verifying system correctness and operational health.