Scale Word-Frequency Processing Beyond One Machine
Company: Robinhood
Role: Backend Engineer
Category: System Design
Difficulty: medium
Interview Round: Technical Screen
Quick Answer: Design a distributed word-frequency pipeline for inputs too large for one process while preserving exact tokenization and ranking. Cover immutable object storage, boundary-safe partitioning, local aggregation, partitioned reduction, idempotent retries, deterministic output, caching, and hot-key mitigation.