Software Engineer Interview Experience

Interview process

Started with background discussion. Interviewer asked about a specific project i mentioned on the resume and dug into details. As for the coding challenge, I was given an existing package which contained an API for reading 4 bytes of data at a type from a file. To read 10 bytes, we had to call this underlying API 3 times to get 12 bytes, respond back with the requested 10 bytes, and keep the extra 2 bytes of data in memory for future calls. I solved this with a queue-based implementation, handling edge cases around reaching the end of the file. Got follow-up questions related to handling API call failures, retries, and streaming the output.