Design Job Scheduler

1. Problem Statement

2. Architecture Discussion Map

Use this as one discussion aid, not a single correct answer. Your design should follow from the requirements, scale, and trade-offs you establish.

graph LR
    A["Design Job Scheduler"]
    A --> F1["Work Ownership leases, leader election, or conditional claims"]
    A --> F2["Fault Tolerance Worker crashing mid-task"]
    A --> F3["Due-Work Discovery next-fire-time index, time buckets, or timing wheels"]
    A --> F4["Delivery Semantics at-least-once dispatch, idempotent execution ids, fencing"]
    A --> F5["Horizontal Scaling"]

3. Key Focus Areas

• 1
  Work Ownership (leases, leader election, or conditional claims)
• 2
  Fault Tolerance (Worker crashing mid-task)
• 3
  Due-Work Discovery (next-fire-time index, time buckets, or timing wheels)
• 4
  Delivery Semantics (at-least-once dispatch, idempotent execution ids, fencing)
• 5
  Horizontal Scaling

4. What the Interviewer Looks For

The interviewer probes these areas, and the report grades the interview against them.

• Requirements, semantics, and capacity
• Due-work discovery and data model
• Ownership, coordination, and duplicate prevention
• Execution reliability and retries
• Burst handling, fairness, and operations