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Meta·Software Engineer·Onsite - System Design / Architecture·Senior

Senior
Jun 2026

Summary

Meta system design round focused entirely on building an agentic AI system for automated ticket investigation. Pretty open-ended prompt with a lot of surface area to cover, and I felt the pressure of not knowing which parts they cared about most.

Questions Asked (1)

Q1

Design an AI-powered agentic system that automatically investigates support and engineering tickets, from reading and classifying the ticket to gathering evidence, diagnosing root cause, recommending resolutions, and optionally executing safe remediation steps while keeping humans in the loop for risky actions.

System DesignTechnical Trade-offsRoot Cause Analysis
Author's notes

This is a beast of a question.

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AI HintsAI Generated

Suggested Approach

Start by clarifying requirements and constraints, then propose a modular agentic architecture with clear separation of concerns: ingestion, classification, evidence gathering, diagnosis, recommendation, and safe execution. Emphasize human-in-the-loop for risky actions and discuss trade-offs around automation, latency, and accuracy.

Pro tip: Anchor your design around a confidence score and risk assessment for each action, and explicitly define the thresholds and fallback mechanisms for human intervention. This shows you prioritize safety and reliability over full automation.

1. Clarify Requirements and Constraints

Ask about ticket volume, types, SLAs, existing tools, and what 'safe remediation' means. Establish non-functional requirements like accuracy, latency, and auditability.

2. Design the Agentic Pipeline

Outline stages: ticket ingestion, classification (using ML/NLP), evidence gathering (logs, metrics, code), root cause analysis (causal inference, knowledge base), resolution recommendation, and optional execution.

3. Define Human-in-the-Loop and Safety Mechanisms

Specify when humans are involved: for low-confidence diagnoses, high-risk actions, or novel issues. Include approval workflows, rollback plans, and audit trails.

4. Address Scalability and Reliability

Discuss how the system handles high ticket volume, ensures low latency, and maintains accuracy. Mention monitoring, feedback loops, and continuous learning.

5. Discuss Trade-offs and Alternatives

Compare full automation vs. human-in-the-loop, rule-based vs. ML approaches, and centralized vs. distributed agents. Justify your choices based on requirements.

Key Points to Mention

  • Modular architecture with clear separation of concerns (e.g., microservices or agent orchestration)
  • Use of NLP/ML for ticket classification and entity extraction
  • Integration with observability tools (logs, metrics, traces) for evidence gathering
  • Confidence scoring and risk assessment to gate automated actions
  • Human-in-the-loop workflows with approval and audit mechanisms
  • Feedback loops for continuous improvement and model retraining

AI-generated suggestions, not part of the candidate's original notes. May be inaccurate — verify before relying on them.