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Data Structures & Algorithms

Given an array and a target integer, write a function that returns the indices of two integers in the array that add up to the target integer.

Target Indices

Write a function to return True if two strings are anagrams of each other and False if they are not

Valid Anagram

Write a function data_stream_median to calculate the median from a stream of integers.

Data Stream Median

This question requires the implementation of the Fibonacci sequence using three different methods: recursively, iteratively, and using memoization.

Implementing the Fibonacci Sequence in Three Different Methods

Given the root node, verify if a binary search tree is valid or not.

Binary Tree Validation

Data Modeling

Design a database schema for a Tinder-style dating app and discuss needed optimizations

Swiping App Design

System design for a digital classroom service.

Digital Classroom System Design

Design a database for a stand-alone fast food restaurant

Fast Food Database

Design a database for a ride-sharing app.

Ride-Sharing App Schema

DevOps

Design a monitoring service for legacy system health via heartbeat endpoints at Glassdoor.

Legacy System Heartbeat Monitor

How would you structure a safe deployment process with effective stakeholder communication and rollback plans?

Safe Deployments

Design a highly available, scalable Azure infrastructure using Terraform and Kubernetes.

Azure Kubernetes Infrastructure

Behavioral

Describing a data project and its challenges

Hurdles In Data Projects

What do you tell an interviewer when they ask you what your strengths and weaknesses are?

Your Strengths and Weaknesses

Business Case

Friend Requests Down

How would you approach promoting Meta's products in an emerging market

Meta in an Emerging Market

Let’s say we’re launching a new version of the PayPal app, but due to a tight deadline, we don’t have time to run the entire suite of 300 automated test cases before release.

How would you handle this situation?

How would you approach limited testing time before a major app release?

Testing Constraints

A/B Testing

When an interviewer asks a question along the lines of:

<ul>
<li>What would your current manager say about you? What constructive criticisms might he give?</li>
<li>What are your three biggest strengths and weaknesses you have identified in yourself?</li>
</ul>

How would you respond?

When asked about your strengths in an interview, what is an effective way to respond?

When asked about your strengths in an interview, what is an effective way to respond?

Your Strengths and Weaknesses I

Which of the following is an acceptable strategy when discussing weaknesses in an interview?

Which of the following is an acceptable strategy when discussing weaknesses in an interview?

Your Strengths and Weaknesses II

<ol>
<li>Design a database for a stand-alone fast food restaurant. </li>

<li>Based on the above database schema, write a SQL query to find the top three highest revenue items sold yesterday. </li>

<li>Write a SQL query using the database schema to find the percentage of customers that order drinks with their meal.</li>
</ol>

How does random forest generate the forest? Additionally, why would we use it over other algorithms such as logistic regression?

What happens when you average the output on multiple decision trees?

What happens when you average the output on multiple decision trees?

Average Trees

How does random forest generate the forest and why use it over logistic regression

Random Forest Explanation

Machine Learning

Given two strings, write a function to return <code>True</code> if the strings are anagrams of each other and <code>False</code> if they are not.

Note: A word is not an anagram of itself.

Example 1:

Input:

<pre tabindex="0" class="chroma"><code>string_1 = &#34;listen&#34;
string_2 = &#34;silent&#34;
</code></pre>

Output:

<pre tabindex="0" class="chroma"><code>True
</code></pre>

Example 2:

Input:

<pre tabindex="0" class="chroma"><code>string_1 = &#34;banana&#34;
string_2 = &#34;bandana&#34;
</code></pre>

Output:

<pre tabindex="0" class="chroma"><code>False
</code></pre>

Given an array and a target integer, write a function <code>sum_pair_indices</code> that returns the indices of two integers in the array that add up to the target integer. If not found, just return an empty list.

Note: Can you do it on \(O(n)\) time?

Note: Even though there could be many solutions, only one needs to be returned.

Example 1:

Input:

<pre tabindex="0" class="chroma"><code>array = [1 2 3 4] 
target = 5 
</code></pre>

Output:

<pre tabindex="0" class="chroma"><code>def sum_pair_indices(array, target) -&gt; [0 3] or [1 2]
</code></pre>

Example 2:

Input:

<pre tabindex="0" class="chroma"><code>array = [3]
target = 6 
</code></pre>

Output:

<pre tabindex="0" class="chroma"><code>Do NOT return [0 0] as you can&#39;t use an index twice.
</code></pre>

Tell me about a data project that didn’t go the way you expected. What did you set out to do, what surprised you, and how did you handle it?

Design a database to represent a Tinder style dating app. 

What does the schema look like and what are some optimizations that you think we might need?

Let’s say you are making a swiping app, similar to Tinder.

What would be the most efficient way (in terms of retrieval time) to store which users have swiped on each other on a database backend?

Let's say you are making a swiping app, similar to Tinder.

What would be the most efficient way (in terms of retrieval time) to store which users have swiped on each other on a database backend?

Swipes Database Design

The Fibonacci sequence is a series of numbers in which each number is the sum of the two preceding ones, usually starting with 0 and 1. It is often used in algorithm examples, and is defined by the following formula: F(n) = F(n-1) + F(n-2), with F(0) = 0 and F(1) = 1.

Your task is to implement the Fibonacci algorithm in three different methods:
1. Recursively
2. Iteratively
3. Using Memoization

Example 1:

Input:

<pre tabindex="0" class="chroma"><code>n = 5
</code></pre>

Output:

<pre tabindex="0" class="chroma"><code>fibonacci(n) -&gt; 5
</code></pre>

Example 2:

Input:

<pre tabindex="0" class="chroma"><code>n = 10
</code></pre>

Output:

<pre tabindex="0" class="chroma"><code>fibonacci(n) -&gt; 55
</code></pre>

The Fibonacci sequence starts as follows: 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55…

Let’s say you work at a company developing a new ride-sharing app.

How would you design a database that could record rides between riders and drivers?

What would the schema of the tables look like and how would they join together?

<h1>Binary Tree Validation</h1>

You are given the root of a binary tree. You need to determine if it is a valid binary search tree (BST).

A valid BST is defined as follows:

<ul>
<li>The left subtree of a node contains only nodes with values less than or equal to the node’s value.</li>
<li>The right subtree of a node contains only nodes with values greater than or equal to the node’s value.</li>
<li>Both the left and right subtrees must also be binary search trees.</li>
</ul>

Given the function <code>def is_valid_bst(root: Node) -&gt; bool:</code>, return True if the binary tree is a valid BST. Otherwise, return False.

<h3>Example:</h3>

Input:

<img src="/s3/questions/9664817c-3e12-4a40-9236-8382b13f55a0.png" alt="image"/>Converted Binary Tree.png

Output:

<pre tabindex="0" class="chroma"><code>def is_valid_bst(Node(3)) -&gt; True
</code></pre>

Let’s say you work as an LLM engineer at an enterprise software company. You are tasked with designing a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) system to ensure that the language model only provides answers based on a specific set of ingested documents, and never responds using its original training data.

How would you architect this system?

Design a RAG system that restricts LLM responses exclusively to ingested data, preventing use of pre-trained knowledge.

RAG Strict Source Control

AI & Agentic Systems

As a data engineer for Slack, they asked you to design their new product, “Slack for School”. When designing their database, you ponder upon the following questions:

<ol>
<li>What are the critical entities, and how would they interact?</li>

<li>Imagine we want to provide insights to teachers about students’ class participation. How should we design an ETL process to extract data about when and how often each student interacts with the app?</li>

<li>Suppose a teacher wants to see the students’ assignment submission trends over the last six months. How would you write a SQL query to retrieve this data?</li>
</ol>

How would you answer?

Write a function <code>data_stream_median</code> to calculate the new median from a stream of ordered integers and the new element which is not yet inserted into the stream.

The median is the middle value in an ordered integer list. If the size of the list is even, there is no middle value, so the median is the mean of the two middle values.

Example:

<pre tabindex="0" class="chroma"><code>new_value = 2
stream = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]
def data_stream_median(new_value, stream): -&gt; 3
</code></pre>

You work as a backend engineer at a company deploying a large language model (LLM) as a service for multiple clients. The LLM must handle concurrent user requests while maintaining low latency, high throughput, and robust fault tolerance.

How would you design the serving infrastructure for this LLM to efficiently manage simultaneous requests from multiple users?

Design a system to handle simultaneous requests to a deployed LLM model ensuring scalability, low latency, and reliability.

Concurrent LLM Serving

Concurrent & Distributed Systems

Given a string <code>s</code>, imagine reading through it one character at a time, as if you’re following a path made of letters. As you move forward, you want to keep track of the longest stretch you can travel without encountering the same character twice. String <code>s</code> consists of English letters, digits, symbols and spaces.

Your task is to find the length of the longest substring without duplicate characters — in other words, the longest continuous portion of <code>s</code> where every character is unique and no repeats interrupt the journey.

<h3>Example 1:</h3>

Input:

<pre tabindex="0" class="chroma"><code>s = &#34;xyzxyzyyxxxx&#34;
</code></pre>

Output:

<pre tabindex="0" class="chroma"><code>def longest_substring_length(s) -&gt; 3
</code></pre>

Explanation: The answer is <code>&#34;xyz&#34;</code>, with the length of 3. Note that <code>&#34;yzx&#34;</code> and <code>&#34;zxy&#34;</code> are also correct answers.

<h3>Example 2:</h3>

Input:

<pre tabindex="0" class="chroma"><code>s = &#34;xxxxxxxxxxxxxx&#34;
</code></pre>

Output:

<pre tabindex="0" class="chroma"><code>def longest_substring_length(s) -&gt; 1
</code></pre>

Explanation: The answer is <code>&#34;x&#34;</code>, with the length of 1.

<h3>Constraints:</h3>

<ul>
<li><code>0 &lt;= s.length &lt;= 5 * 10^4</code></li>
</ul>

The Longest Journey

You work as a backend engineer at Glassdoor. The company relies on multiple legacy systems to aggregate and process job postings, salary data, and company reviews. To ensure reliable data ingestion and processing, you are tasked with building a monitoring service that tracks the health of these legacy systems via regular heartbeat signals.

The service must expose one endpoint to receive heartbeat signals from each legacy system, and another endpoint to return a list of systems that have not sent a heartbeat in the last five seconds. How would you architect this monitoring system? Write a technical design document describing your approach.

To improve customer experience on Uber Eats, what key parameters would you focus on improving?

Delivering an exceptional customer experience by focusing on key customer-centric parameters

Uber Eats Customer Experience

Product Sense & Metrics

Let’s say we’re responsible for deploying a new version of Uber’s routing system, and the release includes both backend and frontend changes that may impact user workflows.

How would you design the deployment process to minimize risk, ensure clear communication with both clients and internal teams, and handle rollbacks if unexpected issues arise?

A product manager at Facebook comes to you and tells you that friend requests are down 10%.

What would you do?

You work as a data analyst on a social media platform similar to Facebook. If you observe a 10% decline in friend requests over the last three months, which analysis or metric-tracking approach could aid in uncovering the reasons?

You work as a data analyst on a social media platform similar to Facebook. If you observe a 10% decline in friend requests over the last three months, which analysis or metric-tracking approach could aid in uncovering the reasons?

You work as a cloud architect at a large enterprise. The company is migrating its core web application to Microsoft Azure and wants to ensure high availability and scalability. You are asked to provision the infrastructure as code, leveraging Kubernetes for orchestration and Terraform for automation.

How would you architect this system to maximize reliability and scalability?

Write a technical design document describing your approach.

Explain the difference between the XGBoost and random forest algorithms and give an example where you would use one over the other.

Why might a data scientist choose to use XGBoost instead of Random Forest for a particular machine learning task?

Why might a data scientist choose to use XGBoost instead of Random Forest for a particular machine learning task?

XGBoost vs Random Forest: Choice

Explain the difference between XGBoost and random forest and give an example where you would use one over the other

Xgboost vs Random Forest

You are designing an ETL pipeline for a model that uses videos as input.

How would you collect and aggregate data for multimedia information, specifically when it’s unstructured data from videos?

Aggregating and collecting unstructured data.

Unstructured Data Pipeline (ETL)

Data Pipelines

Let’s say that you’re trying to run some data processing and cleaning on a <code>.csv</code> file that’s currently 100GB large.

You realize it’s too big to store in memory, so you can’t clean the file using <code>pandas.read_csv()</code>. How would you get around this issue and clean the data?

How would you clean a 100GB .csv file without loading it into memory

Processing Large CSV

Let’s say you work at Meta (Facebook).

The company is looking to grow its userbase in an emerging market.

How would you approach promoting Meta’s products?

Calculate Moving Average	SQL	Easy
Predict Customer Churn	Machine Learning	Medium
A/B Test Significance	Statistics	Medium
Optimize Query Performance	SQL	Hard
Feature Importance Analysis	Machine Learning	Medium
Clean Missing Data	Python	Easy
Neural Network Architecture	Deep Learning	Hard
Calculate Cohort Retention	SQL	Medium
Bayesian Probability	Statistics	Easy
Recommend Similar Products	Machine Learning	Hard

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