ontology

The round that punishes fluency. Candidates who can draw a class diagram in ninety seconds usually score worst, because they modeled the nouns in the prompt instead of the operations the system has to support.

The Deployment Strategist data-modeling case. It looks like schema design; it's graded as ontology thinking, entities with identity, events that link them in time, documents as evidence, plus privacy designed in, not bolted on.

A port is three coupled scheduling problems in a single prompt: where ships dock, which cranes work them, and where containers land in the yard. The strong answer decomposes them, names where they couple, and refuses to solve the whole thing as one giant optimizer.

Per-account scoring catches the lone fraudster and misses the ring whose accounts each look clean. The strong answer reframes the problem as a graph, makes entity resolution the step everything else depends on, and treats a flagged ring as a case for an investigator, not an automatic block.

The number 500 is the trap. Candidates hear it as a scaling problem and design a pipeline factory, when the interviewer is watching to see whether you refuse to ingest 500 things at all.