Match alphanumeric patterns in a stream
Company: Optiver
Role: Data Scientist
Category: Coding & Algorithms
Difficulty: Medium
Interview Round: Take-home Project
Given a reference 7–8 character alphanumeric code and four candidate codes, select the exact match as quickly as possible. Design a system that:
- Efficiently determines whether any candidate exactly matches the reference (consider case sensitivity and lookalike characters such as O/0 and I/
1).
- Supports a streaming setting where batches arrive at increasing rates and latency must remain low.
- Handles input noise (e.g., OCR errors) by optionally allowing a configurable Hamming distance threshold without compromising throughput.
Discuss your data structures (e.g., hashing, tries, SIMD-friendly encodings), algorithmic choices, complexity, and how you would benchmark and scale this for high QPS.
Quick Answer: This question evaluates skills in exact and approximate alphanumeric string matching, streaming pattern lookup, noise-tolerant comparison, and performance-oriented data structures and encodings.