Design EV Telemetry Monitoring App
Company: Ford
Role: Software Engineer
Category: System Design
Difficulty: medium
Interview Round: Technical Screen
You are interviewing for a full-stack software role on an electric-vehicle team.
Design an internal application that displays live vehicle telemetry, such as cabin temperature and current speed, for a fleet of cars. Your answer should cover:
- how each vehicle collects and transmits telemetry
- how the backend ingests, validates, stores, and serves near-real-time data
- what APIs and frontend components you would build for internal users
- how the system can retrieve the latest speed for a specific vehicle
- how you would disable telemetry transmission for a particular vehicle if the company wants that car to stop sending data to external systems
In addition, explain how you would use an AI coding assistant during development to accelerate implementation while still keeping the system correct, secure, and maintainable.
Overview: This question evaluates skills in designing real-time telemetry systems, including vehicle data collection and transmission, backend ingestion and validation, API and frontend design, operational controls for per-vehicle data flow, and the incorporation of AI-assisted development into the engineering process.