Attentive Software Engineer Interview Experience — Back-to-Back Phone Screens, Binary Search on Logs and a 3 Requests/Second API Limit

I had two phone screens back to back.

Coding: binary search on logs, a variant of a problem that is already on the forum.

The twist is that the log timestamps can be duplicated, and the time window I have to return is all inclusive, [start, end].

Also, start and end can fall outside the time range of the current dataset.

System design: it was kind of like pulling data from a third party, and I figure the forum should have write-ups on that already? But the interviewer kept focusing on one thing: what if the third-party API has a hard rate limit, 3 requests per second, and how would I handle it.