Start by clarifying functional and non-functional requirements, then design a high-level architecture that separates message ingestion, delivery, acknowledgement tracking, and reporting. Focus on reliability, auditability, and privacy, and discuss trade-offs for each component.
Pro tip: Emphasize idempotency and exactly-once processing for acknowledgements to avoid duplicate escalations, and mention how you'd handle guardians with multiple children or staff sending to groups.
Ask about scale (number of schools, staff, guardians, messages per day), latency expectations, regulatory requirements (FERPA, GDPR), and integration with existing systems (SIS, email/SMS providers).
Define entities: Staff, Guardian, Student, Message, Delivery, Acknowledgement, AuditLog. Design RESTful APIs for sending messages, retrieving acknowledgements, and generating reports.
Use a message queue (e.g., Pub/Sub) to decouple sending from processing. Implement retries with exponential backoff, dead-letter queues, and idempotent acknowledgement handling. Store delivery and acknowledgement status in a durable database.
Schedule reminders via a workflow engine (e.g., Temporal) or cron jobs. Define escalation policies (e.g., after 2 reminders, notify principal). Log all actions immutably for audit.
Ensure data encryption at rest and in transit, role-based access control, and consent management. Provide reporting dashboards with aggregated metrics and export capabilities.
AI-generated suggestions, not part of the candidate's original notes. May be inaccurate — verify before relying on them.