Applied Intuition Interview Questions
Practice the exact questions companies are asking right now.
Delete duplicate files via DFS
Question LeetCode 609. Find Duplicate File in System – Implement an algorithm (using DFS/backtracking) to delete files with duplicate content in a fil...
Find duplicate files by size
Question LeetCode 609. Find Duplicate File in System — find duplicate files using file size instead of content comparison https://leetcode.com/problem...
Implement a nested object validator
Implement a helper function validate(object, required_style) that checks whether a possibly nested object matches a provided schema. The object may co...
Describe past research and interests
Behavioral Prompt: Research Experience, Methods, Impact, and Roadmap Alignment Context You are interviewing for a Machine Learning Engineer role in a ...
Find grid cell minimizing sum distances
You are given an m x n 2D grid with k marked points. Movement is allowed in four directions (up, down, left, right) with unit cost per step. Find a gr...
Design a job scheduler
Design a Scalable Distributed Job Scheduler Context Design a multi-tenant, horizontally scalable job scheduler for backend services. The system must p...
Explain potential reason for PIP risk
Behavioral Prompt: Self‑Assessment, Early Signals, and Risk Mitigation Context You are interviewing for a Software Engineer role. Imagine you accept a...
Implement and explain positional encoding
Implement Positional Encodings for a Transformer Language Model You are building a Transformer-based language model. Transformers are permutation-equi...
Debug a GPT training pipeline
Fix three bugs in a minimal GPT to meet a training-loss target You are given a Colab notebook with a minimal GPT-style language model implemented in P...
Implement correct attention masking
Autoregressive Transformer: Correct Attention Masking with Padding Context: You are implementing decoder self-attention for an autoregressive Transfor...
Design a coupon pricing engine
Design and implement a coupon application engine for a shopping cart. Each Item has id, category, and unitPrice. A Coupon has: applicableCategories (o...
Implement KV cache for inference
Design Task: Key–Value Cache for Transformer Decoder Inference Context You are building an autoregressive inference engine for a Transformer decoder-o...
Design a transactional in-memory key–value store
Implement an in-memory key–value store that supports transactions. The system must process these commands: ( 1) SET key value — assign or overwrite a ...
Design a nested transaction store
Implement an in-memory key–value store that supports nested transactions with the operations: SET key value, RETURN key, BEGIN, APPLY (commit current ...
Implement transactional key–value store
Design and implement an in-memory key–value store that supports transactions and nested transactional blocks. Your system must process a stream of com...
Walk through a recent project design
System Design: End-to-End Project Walkthrough Provide a structured walkthrough of a recent project you led end-to-end. Organize your answer using the ...
Explain motivation and background
Behavioral Phone Screen — Software Engineer Context You are in a technical phone screen for a Software Engineer role. Expect concise, high-signal beha...
Design duplicate-file detection using size
You are given a large POSIX-like filesystem containing millions of files across nested directories. Design an algorithm to find groups of duplicate fi...
设计目录去重算法并优化
在一个包含多级目录与文件的文件系统中，每个文件有路径与内容。请设计算法删除内容完全相同的重复文件，仅保留每组中的一个，并返回被删除文件的完整路径列表。要求： - 使用 DFS 与回溯遍历目录树； - 说明如何比较文件内容以判定重复，确保正确性（例如文件大小预筛、分块读取、内容哈希）； - 处理异常情...
Design event timeout detector
Design and implement an event-timeout detector for a job scheduler. Inputs: a global timeout T and a stream of events; each event has {event_id, type ...