The whole interview was about 45 minutes.
For the first 30 minutes it was basically just talking about my personal background / resume, mostly around my previous experience, with some follow-up questions based on the resume.
The technical part was only one question:
Given a deck of 52 cards, with 26 red cards and 26 black cards. Cards are drawn one at a time without replacement. Each red card earns you $1, and each black card loses you $1. You can choose to stop the game at any time and keep your current winnings.
Question: How much would you be willing to pay to play this game?
There is no formula you can directly plug into this one. My approach was to treat it as an optimal stopping / dynamic programming problem and work backward starting from the cases with few cards. At each state you take max(stop now, expected value of continuing), and you gradually build up to the initial state of 26 red / 26 black. The interviewer mainly wanted to see the thinking, and didn't necessarily need me to derive a closed-form solution on the spot.
Overall the technical part didn't feel like much, and most of the time was still spent talking about my background.
Hope this helps everyone! This is my first time posting an interview report.
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