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7 questions · Coding · System design · Behavioral
Count the number of islands in a 2D grid of land and water.
CodingApproachFlood-fill each unvisited land cell with BFS/DFS and mark visited; count how many fills you start.
EvaluatesGraph traversal on a grid, visited-state management, and complexity analysis.
Find the length of the longest substring without repeating characters.
CodingApproachSliding window with a set/last-seen map; advance the right edge, shrink the left on a repeat.
EvaluatesTwo-pointer/sliding-window fluency and off-by-one care.
Design and implement an LRU cache with O(1) get and put.
CodingApproachCombine a hash map with a doubly linked list; move touched nodes to the front, evict from the tail.
EvaluatesComposing data structures to hit tight time bounds and getting the eviction bookkeeping right.
Design a social news feed.
System designApproachDiscuss fan-out on write vs. read, ranking, pagination, and the celebrity/hot-key problem.
EvaluatesHandling scale skew and picking the right fan-out strategy.
Design a real-time chat / messaging system.
System designApproachCover connection handling (WebSocket), delivery/ordering guarantees, storage, and presence.
EvaluatesReal-time delivery, ordering, and durability under scale.
Describe a project you are most proud of and your specific contribution.
BehavioralApproachAnchor to measurable impact; be crisp about what YOU did vs. the team, and the trade-offs you made.
EvaluatesOwnership, impact, and honest self-attribution.
Tell me about a time you disagreed with a teammate or manager.
BehavioralApproachUse STAR: the situation, your reasoning, how you disagreed respectfully and reached a decision, and the result.
EvaluatesCommunication, judgment, and whether you can disagree-and-commit without drama.
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