Support ticket routing and SLA
Design a support-ticket routing + SLA-tracking system for an IT helpdesk handling ~40K tickets/day across ~800 agents in multiple regions/skills. Requirements: route incoming tickets to the right agent queue by skill/priority/region, track SLA timers (first-response and resolution targets that vary by priority and pause during business-hours-off / customer-waiting states), escalate or alert when an SLA is about to breach, and rebalance load when an agent goes offline. Read-heavy dashboards but timer correctness is critical.
What a strong answer looks like
Clarify scale and constraints first. Propose a clean component breakdown, then go deep on the hard parts (data model, bottlenecks, consistency, failure modes) and name the trade-offs you are making.
Clarify4:30 left
Estimate4:30 planned
Design13:30 planned
Deep dive10:30 planned
Failure7:00 planned
Which questions mattered is sealed until you submit. Telling you now would just be handing over the edge cases.
Run or narrate your approach, then ask the coach.