Interview Questions

Darpan D. - "Clarifying Travellers in this context are people who are taking domestic or international flights. Answer: Correct. Are we designing to integrate into an existing product line or completely standalone? Answer: Integrate into existing products. Are we designing for a specific geography? Answer: Let’s try North America first; we can expand later. Company Mission Organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. Company Strategy "See full answer

Sahil A. - "Clarify: A new company that is coming up with a solution for garage door openers The door opener will be installed in houses. Confirm if offices, service centers etc are in the scope At this point, we are looking a specific demographic/market - India Users: People who own a car and a personal parking space. The distinction here : They have hired a watchman for the house They didnt hire a watch for the house For this problem, I will focus on those people who didnt hire a watchman"See full answer

R A. - "Company Mission: Make video communication frictionless Product: Zoom is a telecommunications tool used by companies and individuals to interact with one another. It has a freemium business model i.e. it provides some basic features to its users for free and premium features for a subscription. Features: Video and audio interactions. Built-in collaboration features. End-to-end encryption for all meetings. Recording and transcripts. Streamlined calendaring. User Base: "See full answer

Anonymous Mongoose - "The below system design addresses the requirements for a scalable distributed onboarding service, focusing on robust data validation, asynchronous processing, real-time aggregation, and efficient querying of metadata. Core Principles: Asynchronous Processing: Decouple components to ensure high throughput and responsiveness. Scalability & Elasticity: Utilize technologies that can scale horizontally to handle varying loads. Data Durability & Integrity: Ensure no data l"See full answer

Gaurav M. - "To convince leadership at Google to build a wristwatch for the elderly, it's crucial to present a compelling argument that encompasses user needs, market potential, and Google's strategic alignment. Here's a detailed proposal: 1. Understanding the User Needs Target Audience Primary Users: Elderly individuals, especially those with health conditions requiring monitoring and those living independently. Secondary Users: Family members and caregivers. **Pain Points"See full answer

Arunima S. - "I’ll first set the purpose of Instagram Reels Ads as a product: Instagram Reels connect to Meta’s mission of building meaningful connections and build community via connecting people through visual storytelling. It’s a popular product with typically Billions of active users. The business model of Meta is largely dependent on ad revenue and Ads on Reels shall primarily be poised to improve revenue for Instagram Reels and in turn Meta, and on secondary notes the upside could be in improving produc"See full answer

Million D. - "Machine learning software engineer interviews at Google are really challenging. The questions are difficult, specific to Google, and they cover a wide range of topics."See full answer

Shashank S. - "Prioritizing competing features involves evaluating and comparing different features to determine which ones to implement first, based on their relative importance, value, and impact on the product and users. Here are some steps to help prioritize competing features: Define the goals and objectives: Identify the product's overall goals, target audience, and key performance indicators (KPIs). This will help you understand what features are most important to achieve these goals. **Gather"See full answer

Tracy M. - "I defaulted to a dictionary-style definition of autonomy, then loosely tied it to users and systems. But I missed the interviewer’s signal that this was really a design/strategy probe. Stopping at a generic level made it sound like I couldn’t translate agency into what matters for product — user trust, trade-offs, risk, and roadmap implications."See full answer

P K. - "Clarifying question 1: Define Friend requests -- no. of friend requests sent in the platform through the "Add Friend" button Clarifying question 2: Time period for comparison - 10% - WoW or DoD or MoM? -- WoW Gathering context: Is the decline progressive or a one-time event? --> progressive Because the decline is progressive, ruling out technical glitches, downtime, or any other reason impacting the feature uptime. Is this decline global or regional? --> global Because the"See full answer

Adam L. - "Discussed: Requirements of the system: latency language modality (assume keyboard typing) availability of data (assume cold start) success metric (accuracy of next word predicted?, or minimize false positives? -> accuracy to start) Data collection and processing: design ethical user experiments to collect typed out data design a simple tokenization strategy (word level encoding, character level encoding, byte-pair encodings, and discuss tradeoffs) collect data, and split"See full answer

Jagriti C. - "Clarifying questions: Will this be within the facebook blue app or will this interface/app sit separately? Volunteering can be of a few types- say for social causes or volunteering in college fest/ music fest etc. Is there a specific type of volunteering we need to consider? Let's start by revisiting company's mission statement and see if this gels with the mission- Meta's mission- To give power to build community and bring the world closer together. Volunteering is basically a way for hu"See full answer

Aabid S. - "We had a huge launch on September 1st of this year where we completely redesigned our application from the grounds up and also migrated to a new platform (React.JS). This project took us 8 months and the launch was a huge deal for the team. Unfortunately the launch wasn't as smooth as we expected and despite doing multiple rounds of QA, some major issues cropped up in the core part of the app right after launch and our client was quite upset since it was disrupting their day-to-day workflow. "See full answer

Kwabena B. - "Clarification Define rush hour? hours leading up to the work day 8-10am and after the work day 5-7pm Are we focused on specific types of drivers? American commuters. Private drivers going to and from work What is Google's goal? Increase engagement with google services Roadmap for interviewer: User--> Pain Points-->Solution--> Vision-->Features-->Tradeoffs User American commuters. Private drivers going to and from work Can't be too distracted even durin"See full answer

Aneesh M. - "In the Slack system design interview, I proposed a WebSocket-based architecture for real-time messaging, supported by a network of distributed chat servers. To track user connections and route messages efficiently, I leveraged ZooKeeper as a service registry and designed peer-to-peer communication between servers. For the data layer: • I used PostgreSQL to manage relational data such as users and chat participants. • Cassandra was chosen for high-throughput, scalable message storage with dura"See full answer

Babaa - "Function signature for reference: def calculate(servers: List[int], k: int) -> int: ... To resolve this, you can use binary search considering left=0 and right=max(servers) * k so Example: servers=[1,4,5] First server handle 1 request in let's say 1 second, second 4 seconds and last 5 seconds. k=10 So I want to know the minimal time to process 10 requests Get the mid for timeline mid = (left+right)//2 -> mid is 25 Check how many we could process 25//1 = 25 25//4=6 25//5=5 so 25 + 6 +"See full answer

Pranay N. - "Okay, so before we start discussing how to design this platform, I have a few questions I need details on. Clarification Questions: What do you mean by "Podcasting Platform"? Producing a platform and releasing it online takes several steps (Ideation, scripting, equipment selection, recording, editing, choosing a platform to release, etc.). Are we looking at any specific step here? - Free to Assume Am I PM at Google designing a Podcast Platform as a tool inside existing Google Pro"See full answer

Ushita S. - "A clarifying question: Is this question asking about when I met a tight deadline in a project or how did I manage a project that had a tight deadline? The answer uploaded to this question is good, I would also add 'creating a critical path from overall project schedule and then making sure that none of the deliverables in the critical path are sacrificed in order to meet the tight deadline' as an action taken."See full answer

Jasmin R. - "Candidate: Before we go ahead I have a few clarifying questions, I’d like to ask. Interviewer: Sure. Candidate: What is the exact definition of a restaurant, are we counting coffee shops, bars, street food trolleys, homemade food shops that only has delivery to customers’ place and etc... kinds of a restaurant as well? Interviewer: let’s assume that we only mean restaurants that people can go inside, order some food and eat. Let’s not consider bars and coffee shops and so"See full answer