Implement ad matching and delivery routing
Company: Amazon
Role: Software Engineer
Category: Coding & Algorithms
Difficulty: medium
Interview Round: Technical Screen
Part A: Implement a data structure for an ad-matching service that supports add(campaign), remove(campaign), and match(request), where a request has attributes (e.g., location, device, interests) and campaigns specify targeting predicates and budgets. Optimize for fast matching and frequent updates; discuss complexity and trade-offs. Part B: Given a weighted road graph with nonnegative edges, a depot, and N delivery stops, implement plan_route(graph, depot, stops) to produce a near-optimal route. Compare exact versus heuristic approaches (e.g., shortest paths plus TSP heuristics), analyze complexity, and handle practical constraints such as capacity or time windows.
Quick Answer: Implement ad matching and delivery routing evaluates algorithm design, data structures, correctness, complexity, edge cases, and implementation details in a realistic interview setting. A strong answer states assumptions, handles edge cases, explains trade-offs, and shows how to validate the result clearly.
Solution
# Solution Alignment
The prompt asks for an implementation-level answer. The safest way to present it is to define the state, maintain clear invariants, then walk through complexity and tests.
## Problem Restatement
Part A: Implement a data structure for an ad-matching service that supports add(campaign), remove(campaign), and match(request), where a request has attributes (e.g., location, device, interests) and campaigns specify targeting predicates and budgets. Optimize for fast matching and frequent updates; discuss complexity and trade-offs. Part B: Given a weighted road graph with nonnegative edges, a depot, and N delivery stops, implement plan_route(graph, depot, stops) to produce a near-optimal route. Compare exact versus heuristic approaches (e.g., shortest paths plus TSP heuristics), analyze complexity, and handle practical constraints such as capacity or time windows.
## Recommended Approach
Model the states explicitly and use BFS for unweighted shortest paths, Dijkstra for weighted non-negative paths, or topological DP for DAGs. Track visited states at the right granularity so cycles do not cause repeated work.
## Correctness
The implementation should maintain an invariant after each loop or operation that directly matches the problem statement. At termination, that invariant implies the returned value has considered every valid candidate exactly once, or has preserved the required data-structure state after every API call.
## Complexity
BFS is O(V + E) time and O(V) space for a standard graph. Expanded-state problems multiply those bounds by the number of state dimensions.
## Edge Cases and Tests
Disconnected graph, source equals target, cycles, duplicate edges, unreachable target, and whether the answer counts nodes, edges, moves, or transfers.