Interview Questions

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

Alice S. - "Clarify the problem. Ask lots of questions to uncover the root cause of the problem. This could be related to internal factors like releasing buggy updates or external factors like market trends, infrastructure, regulation etc etc. Establish where in the user journey the problem might be happening, if it's happening for a subset of users or for everyone e.g. on iOS platform etc etc, what time period has the problem occurred? Gradually or suddenly? How is the metric (in this case revenue)"See full answer

Aviran H. - "Product Overview: Instagram, a social network owned by Meta, allows users to create and share various types of content, including photos, videos, and Reels, which are short, TikTok-style videos. The platform serves different user segments, including content creators, viewers, and the platform itself as an ecosystem. User Segmentation: I segmented users into three primary categories: Content Creators: This includes businesses, public figures, influencers, and regular users who crea"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

Adam M. - "This is a great question! If you don't mind, I'd love to list 3 strengths and weaknesses then dive a little deeper on one of each of them. I think my three greatest strengths are: Empathy Openness to feedback Drive And three weaknesses I have been working to strengthen are: Sometimes my desire to achieve can put me at risk of overcommitting Communicating status to the right stakeholders at the appropriate time Creating detailed and strategic lists of priorities so I can meet th"See full answer

NKM - "In my previous role as a Technical Integration Lead, the business wanted a notification feature to alert clients about new clients or documents. They wanted real-time in-portal notifications and daily email summaries at 7am. I built a Kafka listener to catch events, saving them in the DB with a "new" status. For logged-in clients, I used WebSocket to push notifications to their portal. The system checks for new docs/clients on page load and displays them. For emails, I set up a Stone branch sche"See full answer

Amishr - "For a mature product, I would do the following - Review the list of backlog items Meet with stakeholders and business owners to verify the relevance (are they still valid? esp. for new feature request) Break down the backlog list by a. Product improvements b. New features c. Operational Resiliency Do a 70-30 split with New features+Product Imp =70%, Resiliency =30% Prioritize by impact/scale and effort (team's capacity) by quarter Revisit Quarterly For a new product - Start"See full answer

Kat - "Clarification: What types of jobs are we targeting? Are we talking about a broad market (like Indeed) or more focused—white-collar (LinkedIn-style) or blue-collar (gigs and tasks)? Where are we launching the marketplace—U.S. or globally? Let’s assume U.S. for now. Is this a standalone product or integrated within one of Meta’s existing platforms (Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram)? Let’s assume it’s integrated into Facebook. Overview: Meta’s Mission: Why would Meta want to launch a"See full answer

Maya B. - "Sounds like interesting problem! First I'd like to clarify a few things.... Clarify/Find Constraints. WHO - who are we improving the post-booking experience for? restaurant visitors? or restaurant staff who view reservations? new vs existing users? WHAT - what do we mean by improve? is there a specific metric we're looking to improve upon (user experience? increasing show-up rate? booking a second time? etc.?) confirm process/JTBD - are we referring to the standard OpenTab"See full answer

Dhruv M. - "During my internship at Quantiva Solutions, I was leading a small team of fellow interns on a data visualization project. I was very focused on meeting the deadline and often pushed the team to keep moving quickly through tasks. About midway through the project, one of my teammates pulled me aside and said that while they appreciated my organization, they felt I wasn’t giving enough space for others to contribute ideas and that it made the collaboration feel more task-driven than team-oriented."See full answer

Rahul J. - "Clarifying questions Target market: parents Geo: USA Key value proposition: help people in parenting Target market assessment Reach: Every year, millions of people become parents and they need to take majority of decisions for their children till the child is 18. Frequency: The decision making and guidance is needed on almost every aspect of the child's life - so the frequency is high Importance: Making decision and managing children is one of the most important aspect of people"See full answer

Ekta M. - " Honestly, the first question should be can you please explain the question in detail. Below is my breakdown of this question What kind of furniture market? Online or store-based? Will Google produce the furniture or will it be an aggregator? Once understood let us ask more clarifying questions Why does Google wanna get into this space? Is it to increase revenue or engagement? Is there a region that Google is thinking of starting in? I**s there a problem to be solved? What is the motivation"See full answer

Richard W. - "int getMaxWater(vector& nums) { int n = nums.size(); int mx = INT_MIN; int i=0, j=n-1; while(i<j) { int water = (j - i) * min(nums[i], nums[j]); mx = max(mx, water); if(nums[i] < nums[j]){ i++; } else { j--; } } return mx; } `"See full answer

Unicorn 2. - "I would like to ask a few clarifying questions Lyft for kids: Does this mean we want to design a ride sharing app for kids? (Assuming yes) Do we have any existing features catered to kids? (Assuming no) Lyft has a lot of features. I am going to assume basic table stake features which Lyft already has as: Ability to call for a ride Ride tracking Are there any goals that we would like to achieve with this feature? If we look at current market conditions, Lyft has biggest threat f"See full answer

Scott S. - " The Situation A few months ago, our trading platform started experiencing significant latency issues during peak trading hours. This latency was affecting our ability to process real-time market data and execute trades efficiently, potentially leading to substantial financial losses and missed opportunities. Identifying the Problem The first step was to identify the root cause of the latency. I organized a team meeting with our data engineers, DevOps, and network specialists to gather"See full answer

Janakiram P. - "goal of whatsapp: to connect people at no cost associated to it, over internet, with complete privacy and 100% encryption clarify improve means? increase # of users increase revenues? increase # of countries its used in ? increase features ? who are the customer personas of whatsapp: students working professionals families individuals SMEs current features of whatsapp : communication: video/audio calls, messages document sh"See full answer

Shen A. - "I will interpret the question as "focus on the next 5 years". I will also give a high-level helicopter view since I’m supposed to imagine I’m CEO of Shopify. The mission of Shopify has always been to enable merchants and lessen the frictions in conducting commerce. Shopify is not an eCommerce company like Amazon, but a Tools and Infrastructure company like Stripe. Building tools and services for merchants are our core competencies. When we think about the main problems that Merchants have"See full answer

Personal W. - "Payment system requirement assumption: Need to be ACID Amount limitation - some validation for max input size can be done at client level/ API level. Need to store historic info - GDPR The information to be stored for database assumed can be structured so RDBMS like mysql or Postgres Notification requirement - if fail or success need to be text or email to user and or caller Scalable - Assumption that it deals with critical transaction so Availability and Scalability requirement i"See full answer

Dhruv M. - "I was assigned to a project where the executive team said they wanted to "improve customer satisfaction" but provided no specific metrics, target outcomes, or scope. The initial brief was vague; they mentioned customer complaints were increasing, but hadn't quantified the problem or identified which customer segments or processes were involved. My responsibility was to lead the analysis and develop a solution; however, first, I needed to transform this ambiguous directive into a clearly defined"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