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Problem 05 Border Mission Data Hard Concept preview

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.

  • PIA
  • Human in the loop
  • Cross-agency sharing
  • ATO boundary

IllustrativeA 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.

Practice mode

45:00

Starts a 45-minute clock on the prompt. Built for rehearsing an orals technical challenge.

01 · The prompt

“Thousands of container manifests arrive ahead of each vessel, and officers can physically inspect only a small fraction of them. Design a service that scores manifests for risk, explains every score in terms an officer can act on, and learns from inspection results without encoding bias the agency can't defend.”

02 · Ask these first

Each of these changes the design. Ask them before drawing a single box.

  1. Q1 What is the inspection capacity per vessel, and does it change by port?
  2. Q2 Which data sources is the service allowed to use under its PIA?
  3. Q3 How soon do inspection results come back, and how reliable are they?
  4. Q4 Which features are off limits for fairness or legal reasons?
  5. Q5 Does a score ever trigger action on its own, or only a referral?

Practice prompt

Your turn. Requirements, sizing, architecture, trade-offs.

Work it on a whiteboard. Our write-up for this one is still being drafted, so compare your structure against problem 01.

Write-up in progress

The prompt and the opening questions are live. Our full write-up is still being drafted.

You can practice it now. For the finished format, read problem 01.