Reconciliation
You are interviewing for Engineering Manager. This is a 45–60 minute whiteboard / word-problem. Talk through observations as you go. Draw.
Read this document only. Do not open the interviewer page.
Context
You work at a company that digitally captures syndicated-loan data from agent banks’ books and records and puts lenders, agents, and service providers on one permissioned platform.
Lenders still spend a lot of time tying out “what I think I own” against “what the agent’s books say.” Mismatches often show up first as cash-flow breaks, then turn into email chains with the agent, loan admins, and trustees.
Assume a digital data platform already exists. It already holds agent-sourced facilities, positions, cash flows, and notices, and already exposes them through a UI and APIs with permissioning. You are designing a reconciliation product on top of that.
Coverage is on the order of thousands of facilities and trillions of dollars in commitments. Users are operations people at lenders, admins, and agents — not millions of consumers.
Problem
Design the reconciliation system.
A lender (or their admin/trustee) should be able to compare their view of positions to the agent’s records at a point in time, see where they do not match, and understand enough to act without starting a 40-message email thread.
The business wants this to replace a class of “please confirm my position” calls. They care that the screen is something an operations person can work.
What to produce
- Clarify requirements. Ask questions. Write down what you are optimizing for.
- Sketch APIs or main operations.
- Draw a high-level design and walk through a reconciliation run.
- Go deep on the hardest parts.
- Close as an engineering manager: what ships first, who owns what, what you measure, how you talk about risk.
You may assume a cloud environment similar to Azure. You do not need to pick a UI framework.