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

Umang S. - "Just a bit of context on what could be a risk in Product or Software Development. We talk about the Scope, Quality, and Time Triangle. IMHO the only variables that can matter and can pose risk are these. Try to form an answer where you used the Effort, Value, Risk framework to quantify the risk. The answer can be similar to short term sacrifices for long term gains, as you do take in mind the risk the short term sacrifices pose. Situation - I was leading the team to complete an overhaul of the"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. - "I work at a startup that makes software for Law Enforcement and the FBI. Our product analyzes calls being made by prison inmates and "listens" for predictors of violence and criminal behavior. Our clients are some of the top state prisons in the country. Recently one of the largest states in the country decided to evaluate our product for their prison system. I demo'd the product to the officers and they seemed to like everything. During the presentation they asked us if the product was ADA com"See full answer

Vijay M. - "Very well done."See full answer

Mathursan B. - "Each song has a playback event that stores information (region, timestamp, etc.) and push to real-time streaming platform and eventually lands into data storage where another service could consume is periodically(say every minute) to compute aggregate counts for the last 7 days. The system can then fetch the top 10 songs by sorting based on playback events using timestamp, optionally filtered by region or genre."See full answer

Praveen - "Narrow down scope with clarifying questions: Confirm that Reactions are the like, love, sad and other icons that facebook users can respond with on your post. Understand the metric: is "down" ... absolute number or is it a ratio of reactions per post? Understand the boundary conditions: Is it specific to a certain region, certain segment of users (only from new users versus active users), happening on personal posts or group posts, happening on app versus desktop/mobile etc. Under"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 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

Lavesh D. - "Approach - Check the product scope - social network, IG, Whatsapp, etc. Check how the metric is measured and if there are shortcomings or changes in the approach Eliminate obvious reasons like seasonality, external events, analytical pipeline changes, etc. Look for internal product changes or issues In case the hypothesis falls short, find ways to triangulate the issue PS - A real interview may not need so many questions to be asked. I am just listing down questions to validate or rej"See full answer

Yao X. - "In general, I don't think Google should go into ridesharing market at this point. (06/2020) I have 3 reasons why Google should not get into ridesharing business at this point and a exception. Reason 1: Current market With major players like Uber and Lyft occupying around 90% of the market, current ridesharing business market is already crowded. These companies have been around for 6-7 years and users already formed the user habit of using either Uber or Lyft when they need a car to go some"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

Kartikeya N. - "Clarifying questions What company are we?: Uber Why do we want to build the feature?: To increase transactions or revenue Do we have a particular problem in mind or am I free to select the same?: You are free to select the same Do we have any constraints or timelines in mind?: Assume working under realistic budget and a timeline of 6 months Can I assume we will have access to relevant data and AI models for the product?: Yes First let's discuss the Vision for Uber. It is to allow peop"See full answer

Yashodhan H. - "Keep the agent Read only mode, and if it has to take any action on behalf of the user, keep a structure which requires user confirmation for it, after that it generates an idempotent key and if the model tried to make up the key or tried to bypass, it cannot do it now as it would require the confirmation key as an arg to take any action. THis all stays in the orchaestrator code, and nothing on the model side. Model is dumb and only can suggest action"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

Amit S. - "YT's mission is to give everyone a voice and show them the world. So when a user is sharing their voice with us in the form of a feedback, I would receive it with open mind. I would first determine what the review is about: 1. app/website's performance 2. quality of content they experienced 3. complain about YT being addictive and causing them to lose time 4. difficulty in using the app/website (search, navigation, recent changes negatively affected their experience) 5. complain about other YTbe"See full answer

Pratik M. - "Few clarifying questions here Is the competitor a service and does it have other offerings as well? Is it charging $5 for a service or only email? Is it for a specific platform here? Or does it include all platforms? Does the competitor have a huge market share/or is it a small company? Let's assume it's only for email's The structure I would want to layout for knowing what to do next for Gmail would be the following - Mission, Goals, Google's revenue model, Customer Profiles using Gm"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

E B. - "Clarifying Points Number of users: unique user id “More than three people” we have user id for the call recipient, and we want number of unique recipients called. We would not count each instance of calling someone. Last week: last 7 days from today SELECT User_id, COUNT(distinct calleduserid) as userscalledcount FROM calls WHERE calldate between currentdate - interval ‘7 day’ and current_date Group by user_id HAVING COUNT(distinct calleduserid) >= 3 This return"See full answer