I was asked to implement file system operations represented by a tree structure. There are two types of nodes: * `DirectoryNode`: Has children, which can be a mix of directory or file nodes. * `FileNode`: Has an `is_encrypted` attribute. **Part 1:** Implement...
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I had a screening round involving a design question about a bookstore. During the onsite interview: - Coding: The question seemed new and involved string pattern matching. Given two strings, use the index of one string to represent the other. For example, if a...
I had a phone screen where I was asked to design a system for an e-commerce business. The scenario was that I am an intermediary, and customers submit an ISBN, bid price, and payment method. The system then queries hundreds of bookstores to find the lowest pri...
I spoke with a senior staff engineer about the design of a RAG system. The engineer works on an internal coding agent. The main problem is how the agent can retrieve the most relevant table/notebook when a user asks a data-related question. The discussion main...
I was asked to design an in-memory key-value store and estimate its QPS load within 5 minutes. The interviewer, a male engineer, provided helpful hints and engaged in discussion. Follow-up questions included: How to save space? How to extend the storage durati...
The problem was to find the fastest mode of transportation to commute from 'S' to 'D' in a 2D city grid, minimizing commute time and cost, given time and cost matrices for available transportation modes. Only horizontal and vertical movement were allowed. I in...
I was asked to design a book seller platform. more details can be found at https://www.hellointerview.com/community/questions/book-seller-platform/cm8j5hkhi009ouxg8w34ni7nd?company=Databricks&ref=1point3acres
This Databricks virtual onsite round started with a board game API: initialize a board, place pieces, reject invalid moves, and detect if the latest move creates K in a row. I avoided scanning the full board by checking four directions from the last placed pie...
I was asked to find the shortest time/cost from a source to a destination in a 2D grid using BFS. The optimization involved scanning once instead of four times. The question I got was: ``` from collections import deque class Solution: def bfs(self, grid, start...
