Find Maximum Sum of Contiguous Subarray Length k
Company: Apple
Role: Data Scientist
Category: Coding & Algorithms
Difficulty: medium
Interview Round: Technical Screen
##### Scenario
Monitoring website traffic and needing the highest traffic within any fixed-length time window.
##### Question
Given an array of positive integers representing hits per minute and an integer k, return the maximum sum of any contiguous subarray of length k. Provide time and space complexity.
##### Hints
Two-pointer sliding window keeps running sum; O(n) time, O(
1) space.
Quick Answer: This question evaluates skill in array manipulation and computing aggregate metrics over fixed-length intervals, along with understanding of algorithmic complexity and trade-offs between runtime and memory.
Given an array of positive integers nums and an integer k, return the maximum sum of any contiguous subarray of length k. Assume 1 <= k <= len(nums).
Constraints
- 1 <= n <= 200000 where n = len(nums)
- 1 <= k <= n
- 1 <= nums[i] <= 1000000000
- Result fits in 64-bit signed integer
Hints
- Compute the sum of the first k elements as the initial window.
- Slide the window by adding the next element and subtracting the element that leaves; track the maximum sum.