Interview Questions

Alfred O. - "We can use dictionary to store cache items so that our read / write operations will be O(1). Each time we read or update an existing record, we have to ensure the item is moved to the back of the cache. This will allow us to evict the first item in the cache whenever the cache is full and we need to add new records also making our eviction O(1) Instead of normal dictionary, we will use ordered dictionary to store cache items. This will allow us to efficiently move items to back of the cache a"See full answer

Karthik M. - "1. Step 1: clarify Let's establish the mission of Google and Youtube. Google's is to provide and make information more accessible. Youtube's might be to help people get their content, their word and themselves out into the world. I mean so many of Youtube's ads have been about how the diversity of individuals and their content, so that makes sense. Let's establish what is Youtube. Youtube has 3 primary stakeholders - creators, viewers and brands/corporations and within them"See full answer

Maykon henrique D. - "function longestCommonPrefix(arr1, arr2) { const prefixSet = new Set(); for (let num of arr1) { let str = num.toString(); for (let i = 1; i <= str.length; i++) { prefixSet.add(str.substring(0, i)); } } let longestPrefix = ""; for (let num of arr2) { let str = num.toString(); for (let i = 1; i <= str.length; i++) { let prefix = str.substring(0, i); if (prefixSet.has(prefix)) { "See full answer

Ankit J. - "Clarifying Questions: Are we looking to create a product for creators or the end users? - Creators What kind of product are we looking to build? (App /Website/Embedded within the Instagram product ) - Embedded within the app Why do we want to enter the edtech market? (Anything specific insight we have gained which we want to solve for?) - The creator's market is growing substantially and people want to gain knowledge on how to become successful in it. Are there any money or time con"See full answer

Sumeet R. - "Clarifying Questions: Assume US Audience or Worldwide? US Only Assume short form content or long form content ? Assume all Premium or Ads Support ? All Solution: US Population 300M Will remove 70 ages as not relevant audience or not have access to YouTube = 60m Leaving 240M. Adoption of YouTube with remaining Population = 60% (including overlap and exclusion with other services e.g. Netflix) Total Audience that watches YouTube daily = 144m (about half of US Populat"See full answer

Scott S. - " To clarify on what we are trying to solve for and get the definition of a distributed scheduler straight . So A Distributed Scheduler refers to a system that can handle job scheduling and execution in a scalable and fault-tolerant manner by distributing the workload across multiple servers or nodes. we will make some assumptions with the design , as follows: we will assume 10,000 QPS for job submissions and should be able query for jobs status . Job execution should have minimal latency"See full answer

R S. - "My main task was to improve our recommendation system. I worked closely with the business and data teams to understand how recommendations were made in the past. After discussions, I found out that the system had fixed recommendations and didn't consider customer preferences. Our goal was to identify potential customers better, boost conversion rates with personalized recommendations, and increase cross-selling of products. After analyzing a lot of data, we focused on customers with accounts an"See full answer

Anonymous I. - "Great question, first some clarifying questions: I assume that we're talking about meta disrupting the travel industry? Or generally When we say travel industry, this could include modes of transportation, scheduling transportation, what to do when you're there etc.? Are we focused on business travel? Leisure travel? I'm going to assume for the sake of scoping down that we're going to be focused on Leisure travel because business does not have as much pain, and on the flip-side o"See full answer

Ankit M. - "Interviewer: Design a Meta Product for space travel. Me: I would first likely ask a few clarifying questions. Can we discuss more about what do we mean by a product for space travel? Is it like a physical product or a software product? Any existing suite of products that we want to integrate this into? Interviewer: It can be a digital platform – a combination of software and services, integrated in a single ecosystem. It's not a physical product like a spacecraft, but rather a pla"See full answer

Issac K. - "I learned that people and teams build great products, not processes and job descriptions. The quality of the teamwork will directly reflect in the quality of the product. My biggest failure as a product manager was failing to build a foundation of teamwork before starting a project with a new cross-functional team. As the PM of a new product, I like to get my engineers involved early and often in the design process, but tight schedules with an even tighter resources made the tension and st"See full answer

Dhruvin S. - "Clarifying questions, Establish problem, Factors to take into account. Dive in with the numbers request specific numbers based on follow up questions, Calculate based on the numbers and Final Recommendation"See full answer

Kay T. - "How I would approach this question: Understand the goal of the customer service platform: What is the main business goal of this company and how is the customer service platform serving the company goals? For this question, I'm assuming the user journey is that customers come to the customer service platform when they run into issues. Thus, ultimately the customer service platform is feeding into the top line business metric of customer retention. Do customers keep"See full answer

Vivek S. - "Candidate [Clarifying Question 1] - Does success metric needs to be discussed across any particular stage of user life cycle - Growth , Engagement or Monetisation ? Interviewer - Let's focus on overall health metrics of the product. Candidate[Clarifying Question 2] : Does the metrics needs to be presented as an update to CXO in quarterly meetings or monthly meetings or it needs to be presented internally to product / marketing team for detailed analysis ? Interviewer - Let's sa"See full answer

Vikas T. - "This is coming from an Amazon manager who are taught to PIP people out. The first part he said is completely opposite with Amazon. They just pull people randomly into the room and put them either on dev list or PIP. This is unfortunately true for all of Amazon."See full answer

devopsjesus - "This was a 60 minute assessment. The clock is ticking and you're being observed by a senior+ level engineer. Be ready to perform for an audience. The implementation for the system gets broken up into three parts: Implement creating accounts and depositing money into an account by ID Implement transferring money with validation to ensure the accounts for the transfer both exist and that the account money is being removed from has enough money in it to perform the transfer Implement find"See full answer

Danny - "There are way more learning opportunities for us here if we acknowledge that this was not a good example and provide tips on how to improve the answer. All the answers here are superficial and it is clear that the interviewee was unprepared. . The mention of quote "a wise man told me..." (instead of getting to his own personal points) and some lack of confidence with the metrics portion are red flags. . For more concrete example, it is hard to believe that no one wants to fix the slow build proc"See full answer

Alex N. - "The adjusting context window size in LLM change trade off between reasoning capability, accuracy, computation cost. It influence how attention mechanist allocate resources across the input. Longer context window let it you input greater number of words and have more context to generate proper next token. However llms have lost in the middle issue. They remember the beginning of text and end of text but lost information located in the middle of long input. Another problem is Attention Dilution."See full answer

Pushkar G. - "Assumptions - Multiple reader/writer threads issue set() [with transaction] and get() operations concurrently All data can fit into memory. Requirements - Good performance (ex. less lock contention) Optimize memory footprint (ex. don't store stale entries in memory) Naive Approach - Wrap a standard hashmap/dictionary with reader-writer lock. We can also shard the map to reduce lock contention (ex. 32 segments for 32 core cpu) Allocate local buffer to a writer when a transacti"See full answer

Ankit M. - "Me: I would first like to ask a few clarifying questions : Is this tipping issue confined to specific regions? Is this a new problem, or has it always been present? Does this issue affect all types of rides offered by Lyft? Is there a correlation between driver ratings and the likelihood of being tipped? Interviewer: The problem is widespread across all regions where Lyft operates. It's not new but has been consistent over time. The lower tipping rate is uniform across all ride types, i"See full answer

Karthik T. - "Our application has millions of users and significant load on file upload feature. Situation : In our legacy application we had a particular page which was accepting file uploads and it had the legacy way of selecting file uploads and page would redirect you to the next page or show an error message on failure. Task : I had regular calls with the customer who had reported issue multiple times on this application area. In my calls my I also understood that client was expecting some inno"See full answer