AWS, an all-hard loop. I got the interviewer schedule only 2 days before the interviews, but I was matched to a team first and interviewed after that, so it seems there was no way to change anything.
The coding was on a whiteboard, and the interviewer said it did not need to compile.
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30 minutes of coding + BQ. Given a family tree (kinship relations), implement a check for whether any two people are relatives. It looks like an ancestor problem, but what it really tests is whether you know the family-graph approach, which is BFS and looking for an overlap.
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Maybe the bar raiser? System design, 30 minutes + BQ. Design a fleet deploy + orchestration system.
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BQ + 30 minutes of coding. Design a throttle API: for any given time window, each user can only make a specified number of requests.
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BQ + 30 minutes of coding, the hiring manager round. There is a library of a bunch of book titles, and you are given a title and asked whether it is in the library. The given title may have extra or missing spaces. I suggested stripping the spaces from the library, and the interviewer did not agree. I suggested building an inverted index over the book-title library, and the interviewer agreed, but he was not happy with how I did the later matching. In the end I figured out what he had in mind and implemented it: it is a string backtrack that cuts the title into different chunks and checks whether every substring is in the given set of phrases (the index list).
BQ summary... I can't remember each one separately, but roughly they asked about:
- hardest project
- conflict resolution
- influencing teammates
- decisions made under tight time
- tight project
- AI projects
- a time I took the initiative without informing my manager (I don't know if I just blew this one or if it was a trap. I went completely off track on the "without informing" part and told the first incident-handling story, and the interviewer was not satisfied. Looking back, it was probably testing something like out-of-scope work / bias for action)
Apart from the manager round, I felt it went okay. I got rejected 6 days later.
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