Count Machines and Recover a Distributed Tree Topology
Company: OpenAI
Role: Software Engineer
Category: Software Engineering Fundamentals
Difficulty: medium
Interview Round: Technical Screen
Overview: Design a distributed tree protocol that counts machines and reconstructs all nodes and edges without a central inventory. Specify correlation-bound aggregation, retries, deduplication, termination, topology validation, snapshot semantics, and honest handling of unreachable subtrees.