Design an Attendance Payroll Service
Company: Carvana
Role: Software Engineer
Category: System Design
Difficulty: easy
Interview Round: Onsite
Design the backend service for an employee attendance system.
The service should support:
- Employees clocking in and clocking out.
- Computing each employee's total worked duration over a pay period.
- Calculating pay based on worked duration and wage rules.
- Handling high transaction volume during peak clock-in and clock-out times.
- Synchronizing attendance data from another database or external system.
Discuss APIs, data model, architecture, consistency guarantees, failure handling, scalability, and how you would optimize the system if traffic becomes very high.
Quick Answer: This question evaluates system design and backend engineering skills, including API design, data modeling for time-series attendance, payroll computation logic, consistency guarantees, integration/synchronization with external sources, and strategies for handling high-volume, bursty traffic.