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Mission Design Library Concept preview

System design, for missions that can't go down.

Interview prep sites teach you to design a photo-sharing app. Federal programs need people who can design a maritime picture four agencies trust, a test pipeline that works off the grid, and a sharing gateway that holds up in an audit. These are those problems. Problem 01 is worked end to end, the way we work them. The rest are practice prompts, with write-ups to follow.

Prompt 01 · Maritime · Hard 45:00

“Four agencies watch the same stretch of coastline with different sensors, and none of them sees the whole picture. Design a system that fuses AIS, coastal radar and satellite detections into one common operating picture, flags vessels of interest, and shares the result with partners who are each allowed to see different things.”

Start the clock Read the write-up
Problems
05
OCEANS capabilities
04
Federal constraints tracked
08
Photo-sharing apps
00

The problems

Domain
Capability
Complexity

Showing 5 of 5

  1. 01 Design a vessel-of-interest fusion pipeline for a maritime common operating picture Fuse AIS, coastal radar and satellite detections into one picture, and flag the vessels that go dark. Cross-agency sharingCUI markingPIAHuman in the loop Maritime Mission Data Hard Write-up
  2. 02 Design a counter-UAS alerting system for a critical infrastructure site Detect, track and identify drones near a coastal power plant without crying wolf, then hand off to whoever holds the authority to act. Legal authoritiesHuman in the loopATO boundary C-UAS Systems Engineering Very Hard Prompt only
  3. 03 Design a requirements traceability service that survives a re-baseline Carry 4,000 requirements through a mid-program re-baseline without losing the thread to test and hardware. Re-baselineCUI markingDisconnected ops Acquisition Requirements Medium Prompt only
  4. 04 Design the data pipeline for an operational test event Collect sensor, operator and white-team data at a remote range so every measure in the test plan holds up afterward. Disconnected opsCUI markingHuman in the loop T&E RDT&E Medium Prompt only
  5. 05 Design a cargo manifest risk-scoring service for a seaport Score container manifests before the ship arrives, explain every score, and learn from what inspections find. PIAHuman in the loopCross-agency sharingATO boundary Border Mission Data Hard Prompt only

A composite built from public information. It does not describe a specific OCEANS engagement, customer system or solicitation, and every figure on this page is an assumption for the exercise.

What the interview sites leave out

01

Authorization is architecture

Where the ATO boundary sits, which feeds need an ISA and an MOA, what the PIA lets you keep. On a federal program these shape the design as much as throughput does.

02

People are the bottleneck

Six analysts on a watch will bound a system long before the hardware does. Every write-up sizes the humans along with the machines.

03

Measured, not asserted

Each write-up ends with the measures of effectiveness and performance that would prove the design works, and how we would collect them.

Anatomy of a write-up

Nine sections, same order, every time.

The structure is the point. It is the order we work a real program in, so a reader can see where the thinking happens, not only where it lands.

  1. 01

    The prompt

    Stated the way an evaluator would say it, constraints and all.

  2. 02

    Ask these first

    The questions that change the design, before any boxes get drawn.

  3. 03

    Requirements

    Functional needs, plus thresholds and objectives for the rest.

  4. 04

    Sizing

    Back-of-envelope numbers, and which one actually binds.

  5. 05

    Architecture

    A reference diagram with the boundaries drawn in.

  6. 06

    Trade-offs

    The real forks, and the call we would make at each one.

  7. 07

    The federal layer

    ATO, PIA, agreements, markings, retention, Section 508.

  8. 08

    How it fails in month 12

    How a design like this usually fails, and the guard against it.

  9. 09

    How we'd test it

    MOEs and MOPs, and how each one gets measured.

Practice mode

Rehearse it the way orals feel.

Plenty of federal evaluations now include a live technical challenge. Open a problem in practice mode and the clock starts at 45:00. Where a write-up is published, it stays hidden until you reveal it and compare.

Try problem 01 on the clock
  1. 01 Open a problem Press Start practice. The prompt and the opening questions stay on screen.
  2. 02 Work it on the clock The clock starts at 45:00 and any write-up stays hidden.
  3. 03 Reveal and compare Where a write-up exists, check your answer against ours, trade-off by trade-off.

Working a problem like one of these?

These problems are how we think. If your program is facing one of them for real, we would rather talk it through than leave it to a diagram.

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