Interview Questions

Anonymous Crab - "Super helpful video on metrics and experimentation design! However, I did not see any discussion on the actual algorithm improvement ideas. So it left me with these questions: 1) How would you actually improve the algorithm? (e.g. sorting based on amenities preferences, miles from airport, etc.). Of course, totally makes sense that we would test how that improvement moved our chosen success metrics. 2) Should we be choosing one metric or one set of metrics we want to optimize for when we impro"See full answer

Nitika B. - "Equation: Cost = Amount of storage required per year * Cost per year * 3 Amount of storage required per year = DAU * Storage requirement/user * 365 Assumptions: Cost per year = $99 = $100 Smart phone growth rate = 2% (But negligible at Pixel level) Annual Smart phone users = 2.8B Android users = 76% Google Pixel users = 1% Total Users = 2.8B * 0.01 = 280M *0.01 = 2.8M Method 1: Cost = Active Users + Cost/year * Number of years Cost = 3* 2.8M * $100 = 8.4M*100 = $840M Cost = $8.4B Method 2: C"See full answer

Dinar M. - " Thanks a lot for showing us how a recommender system can be build. I see it was proposed to use Collaborative filtering which is user - item matrix having dimension N * M (where N - number os users and M - number of songs). Though, it was explained how it gonna be built, it is still unclear how all users and songs features are going to be used. In that matrix we have values in cell (lets say i, j) like 1 - a specific user (i) clicked on song (j) when it was recommended or it is 0 when the user"See full answer

Hari priya K. - "Smart Lock : Clarifying Questions : Are* we *talking about the locks we use for the doors or locks used for suitcases or study lockers ? "Scope is yours" What do we need by smart ? Are we a company that are already in lock business? - Yes Do we have significant marketshare in lock business ? - Yes Are we trying to address or improve any customer pain point or improve our metric? - "No" Customer Segment : Tech savvy - non tech savvy- Customer buys Old"See full answer

corrie881 - "The question is about Netflix users decreasing 10%, not about delivery app."See full answer

Sachin P. - "The key here is a) not to overreact to Sales bypassing me going straight to Engineering (while understanding every team acts according to their incentives), and b) communicate with all parties as much as possible to get everyone on the same page. 1) First, I'd speak to Sales and understand the feature being requested. I consider Sales to be one of the most important primary research funnels - they have direct, regular touchpoints with the client and are finely attuned to the lifeblood o"See full answer

San S. - "How might the system design change if it is limited specifically to a web/mobile use case?"See full answer

Ushita S. - "The back-of-the-envelope calculation is very well done!"See full answer

Imju B. - "Wondering what is the difference between OKR based and Roadmap based. I feel it is based on the time horizon."See full answer

Karthik R. - "Good Discussion on the distributed messaging queues (Complex topic with lot of nuances) Liked the mind-map style drawing of requirements and metrics capture Touched on different types of queue styles (point to point, pub-sub, fan-out/fan-in) Storage and WAL usage was interesting Some distributed queue challenges that could be helpful to highlight / expand are: Message guarantee / semantics - Ordering of messages across different servers Replication Master slave architecture or Pe"See full answer

Priya T. - "INTERVIEWER: Design a communication app for children ME: GOAL: What are the business goals for this initiative? INTERVIEWER: Please assume. ME: Goals could be to* *improve communication skills/ communicate with classmates/friends better/enter a new market/empower children with disability to communicate better/etc. I’ll assume that the goal here is to enable children to communicate and engage better with their classmates since I have personally seen my niece and nephew (17 a"See full answer

Linying W. - "Very helpful! But I have a question: the location of drivers can be changing every minute, so won't reading from location cache returning stale data?"See full answer

Anjali P. - "Question and video tagged not same. "See full answer

Vishal S. - "Product Understanding - Ads are what you see from companies as stories, posts, reels. Post are from users (connections). We have to design an experience which produces maximum engagement while generating ad revenue. Clarifying Questions - Is it specific to posts/stories/reels ? Is there an existing post to ads ratio or do we have to start from scratch? Is it specific to a device/OS? Is it specific to a region/user demographic? Assumption - Existing posts to ads ratio"See full answer

So X. - "Why is the value of an Android user only considering incremental clicks on ads instead of all clicks on ads?"See full answer

Dheeraj D. - "Thanks Hozefa for your insights on this. I see that hozefa talks about giving used cases. It would be very helpful if there was an example provided with STAR framework."See full answer

M D. - "Understand the business problem: Identify the business problem that the AI data product is intended to solve. Identify the target audience: Understand who will be using the data and what problem they will be solving for using the data. This will inform the features and functionality that should be included in the product. Gather and preprocess the data: Collect and preprocess the data that is relevant to the problem that it is being solved for. This will inform the AI algorithm"See full answer

Krishnan S. - "Excellent job Roshan, really liked the explanation. Which software were you using to explain the system design diagrams?"See full answer

M N. - "What is rider cancellation? Is it a rider requesting a ride but hitting the cancel button after the driver is on their way? Yes. I can see why it's concerning since that affects our # of completed rides and driver earnings. Let's try to understand the root cause. Rider cancellations have increased in what time period? We noticed it last week. Was it slowly dropping for a while or did we notice it only last week? It was a sudden drop last week How did other metrics behave last week? For eg,"See full answer