Section 12: Forty-Five Minutes, Spoken Aloud - Full Candidate Interview Script

Executive Summary: Eleven sections built the system; this one fits it into the time you actually get. We cut the interview into six time-boxed phases, each with the lines worth saying word for word and the artefact that should be on the board when it ends. Then come a two-minute close you can deliver as written, a 100-point scorecard with score bands that point back to the section to re-read, and four isomorphs showing what carries over and what flips.

You have forty-five minutes and roughly forty ideas worth saying. Strong candidates don't know more about Flink or Event Hubs. They decide in advance which ten ideas carry the design, say each in a sentence or two with a number attached, and keep the other thirty ready for when the interviewer asks. The script isn't something to recite. It's a budget.

The Arc on One Page

The heaviest block, twelve minutes, goes to the Detection Engine on purpose: it decides whether you have a design or a diagram, and it carries a quarter of the scorecard.