Design camera access-control service
VerkadaSoftware Engineer · Technical Screen
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This interview question evaluates requirements, scale assumptions, API/data design, architecture, trade-offs, failure modes, and rollout in a realistic interview setting. A strong answer for Design camera access-control service states assumptions, handles edge cases, explains trade-offs, and shows how to validate the result clearly.
Design an access-control service for users, cameras, and nested groups that can answer queries like: Does user U have access to camera C? and Which users have access to all cameras? Cover data model choices (relational vs. graph), APIs, indexing and caching strategies, consistency and authorization change propagation, cycle prevention in group hierarchies, scaling and sharding, precomputing transitive memberships versus on-demand traversal (e.g., BFS), and approaches for incremental updates and auditing.
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