I feel really lucky, I got a great recruiter. From the initial reach out all the way to finalizing the offer they were thorough about everything, kept emphasizing "I'm on your side." In the debrief they told me Coding 2 had a weak signal, but the quorum still generously let it through. The interviewers were all nice too — when I interviewed for an intern role before I ran into people who were dismissive and disrespectful, and I didn't run into anything like that at all this time. Thank you, thank you!
Timeline: March-June 2026, initial call to offer.
Screen (the interviewer, NYC)
88 - Merge 3 sorted arrays together, also remove duplicates.
71 - Simplify path of the cd command arg, and apply it to the cwd command to return the final absolute path.
BQ (hiring manager, friendly and polite)
Alternation of examples.
More on cross-functional leadership.
Coding 1 (interviewer, 3 years of experience, polite, NYC/Boston)
314 - the original problem, used DFS with a memory-stack optimization. A simple dry run was enough.
162 - a variant. Local min, binary search — we talked through the approach but it was too simple, so they required an iterative approach only, then a followup on how to minimize the number of condition checks. Ended up using a prev pointer to determine whether the current value is a local min.
Coding 2 (interviewer, technical type, London)
380 - implement a container to store elements. The container should support 2 methods:
insert(T element): insert the element into the container
popRandom(): remove and return one element from the container with equal chance
Used a hashmap plus an array — pick a random element, swap it with the last element in the array, then pop, to get O(1) complexity.
Find the number of distinct values K in a sorted array. Couldn't find the original problem. After a round of brute force, used a prev pointer to identify duplicates to get to O(log(size)) roughly, since K is much smaller than the size of the array.
Binary search on the boundary condition. I wrapped it in a layer of bfs-style thinking and explained the approach, which was acknowledged, but the implementation wasn't bug-free — they pointed out it might double count. After the interview I emailed a followup with another approach and a test case. The feedback gave a weak coding signal but it still passed.
System Design (interviewer, tired)
Design Twitter: add post, retrieve post, search post.
High level architectural design -> API design -> data streaming -> database selection -> service scaling -> feature workflow walk through.
I led the whole thing myself and talked non-stop, occasionally checking in for consensus — the interviewer only had two or three clarifying questions the entire time. Unfortunately I hadn't specifically prepared this question, so some of the services didn't get covered, I just briefly walked through the dataflow to wrap up. The feedback said the technical comprehensiveness was strong, but there wasn't enough narrowing down and follow-up questions. Probably means I didn't do a good enough job on clarification, breaking down the problem, and practicality evaluation.
Logistics
Team matching call x4, offer negotiation call x2, new hire orientation x1.
The recruiter finally called me right before I got on a flight, and did this whole build-up-then-release thing — told me there was a weak signal, but that it passed. My heart was about to jump out of my chest from how nervous I was. Interviews weren't plentiful this quarter to begin with, and all my hopes were riding on this one, so it ending up as a happy ending meant a lot. I really hope everyone still on the road finds the place they want — get hit by that big offer package!!!
Discussion
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