Design Org Chart & Directory

Problem Statement: Enterprise Org Chart at Scale

Workday-scale directory: visual hierarchy, manager chain, department rollups, and people search for 250k employees across acquired subsidiaries.

Problem Statement: Enterprise Org Chart at Scale — design checkpoint (understanding)

Anchor decisions on employee_id stickiness, closure table versioning, and HRIS CDC before search ack — not generic "enterprise-grade" wording.

Mechanism (closure): Workday-scale directory: visual hierarchy, manager chain, department rollups, and people search for 250k employees across acquired subsidiaries. Track 250k employees, 18k managers, 4.2 hierarchy depth avg as owned SLOs on Directory UI → Org API → HRIS Connector.

Mechanism (effective-dating): When Directory UI calls Org API, HRIS Connector persists with fail-closed policy on HR DAG violations.

Mechanism (avatar CDN): Interviewers at Workday/Microsoft/BambooHR will probe closure vs effective-dating trade-offs — quantify one metric, name the owning service, state fail-closed vs fail-open.

Operational note: During understanding discussions, cite chart expand P99, closure rebuild throughput, and HR ingest lag as first-class signals.

Interview tip: Quantify one number from this section, name the service that owns it, and state what fails closed vs open.

Why interviewers care

Org Chart & Directory interviews reward crisp scope, explicit trade-offs, and failure stories—not generic microservice diagrams.

Interview checkpoint

Name one failure story for Problem Statement: Enterprise Org Chart at Scale that proves you understand real outages, not happy-path diagrams.