Spreadsheet Formula Engine with Cycle Detection
Company: Harvey
Role: Software Engineer
Category: Coding & Algorithms
Difficulty: medium
Interview Round: Technical Screen
Overview: This question evaluates a candidate's ability to design a stateful data structure that models dependency relationships and lazily propagates updates, a common theme in coding and algorithms interviews. It tests skills in graph traversal, cycle detection, and choosing between eager versus lazy evaluation to optimize for a given read/write workload. This is a practical, implementation-level problem assessing system design intuition within a single class rather than pure theoretical knowledge.