Amazon Software Engineer Interview Experience — Online Assessment with a Merge-Strings Conflict Problem and an AI Spring Boot Bug-Fix Task

CODE

Given two strings (lowercase English letters), primary and secondary, with lengths m and n respectively, try to merge them into one string:

1. Keep the original order within each string
2. A smaller character has higher priority

A conflict is defined as the case where a character with low priority is merged before a character with high priority in the final merged string.

For example, if the merged string = "zab", the number of conflicts is 2.

Find the minimal number of conflicts.

Input: the two strings
Output: the minimum number of conflicts

2 AI Spring Boot

Fix bugs in a Movie search backend. The logic is complicated:

1. Partial match
2. Match movie title, stars, or ALL
3. Ignore lower/upper case
4. Sort by popularity and others
5. Only published movies