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Product-minded loops with practical coding rounds — string and array manipulation with fiddly edge cases shows up often, and design rounds stay grounded in surfaces like feeds and boards.

Typical loop

  1. 1Recruiter screen
  2. 2Technical phone screen: one coding problem
  3. 3Onsite: two coding rounds
  4. 4System design round
  5. 5Behavioral / cross-functional round

Practice questions

Max Width

Algorithms & Data Structures · Greedy line packing and fiddly space math — full text justification.

hard

Round Numeric String Values

Algorithms & Data Structures · Arbitrary-precision rounding — floats need not apply.

medium

Violation Log Analyzer

Algorithms & Data Structures · Streaming design: recent counts, top-k, and sliding-window bans.

medium

Nested Set Equality

Algorithms & Data Structures · Order and duplicates vanish at every depth — canonicalize.

medium

Assign Pins to Shortest Columns

Algorithms & Data Structures · The masonry-layout greedy: shortest column wins, leftmost on ties.

medium

Collect Pins from Reachable Boards

Algorithms & Data Structures · BFS over the bipartite pin-board graph without building board-to-board edges.

hard

Stream Line Reader

Algorithms & Data Structures · Reassemble lines from arbitrary chunks, then settle the balances they carry.

hard

Escape-Room Leaderboard

Algorithms & Data Structures · Best-time standings with live ranks — the data-structure trade-off talk.

medium

Rebalance Experiment Buckets with Minimal Reassignment

Algorithms & Data Structures · Meet new group sizes while disrupting as few buckets as possible.

medium

List Unallocated Experiment Buckets

Algorithms & Data Structures · Interval sweep for the free ranges — independent of bucket-space size.

medium

Design a Smallest-Free ID Allocator

Algorithms & Data Structures · Smallest-free allocation under a capacity that moves at runtime.

medium

Cross-Reference Logs to Flag Spam Numbers

Algorithms & Data Structures · A hash join across two logs — and saying that word out loud.

medium

Sparse Matrix Storage, Addition, and Multiplication

Algorithms & Data Structures · Storage proportional to nonzeros — and the cancellation trap.

medium

Select the Nearest Eligible Elevator

Algorithms & Data Structures · A requirements-gathering problem wearing a simulation costume.

easy

Decide Target via Subsequence Plus/Multiply Expression

Algorithms & Data Structures · Expression search with precedence — the (total, pending product) trick.

hard

Compute Reachable Cells for a Cleaning Robot

Algorithms & Data Structures · Slide-until-blocked physics: rest positions are the states, not cells.

medium

Maximize Boxes Stored Through One Entrance

Algorithms & Data Structures · Prefix-min ceilings plus an exchange-argument greedy.

medium

Mark and Compact a Heap-Indexed Subtree

Algorithms & Data Structures · Garbage collection in miniature: mark a subtree, compact, remap.

medium

Build Tabs

Frontend · One active index drives the whole component.

easy

Design Adjustable ID Allocator

Algorithms & Data Structures · Pack named ID ranges, then resize with all-or-nothing shifts.

medium

Settle Debts

Algorithms & Data Structures · Net the balances, then match debtors to creditors greedily.

medium

Reconstruct Itinerary

Algorithms & Data Structures · Hierholzer's walk, plus the loop question that fails candidates.

hard

Access-Log Query System

Algorithms & Data Structures · Two sorted indexes and a binary search you write by hand.

medium

Bus Routes: Minimum Transfers

Algorithms & Data Structures · BFS over routes, not stops — clear each stop as you expand it.

hard

Board Reachability with Exact Jumps

Algorithms & Data Structures · Two out-edges per index; BFS answers both parts in one pass.

easy

Restaurant Seating: Free Intervals

Algorithms & Data Structures · A +ppl/−ppl sweep; occupancy is constant between events.

medium

Count Pins on a Two-Column Screen

Algorithms & Data Structures · Only n scroll offsets matter — slide the window to a pin's top.

medium

Count Subarrays with Score Below K

Algorithms & Data Structures · Positives make sum × length monotone — a two-pointer window.

medium

Count Objects in a Pixel Grid via an API

Algorithms & Data Structures · Flood fill through an opaque API — isSameObject is the catch.

medium

Roads with Switches

Algorithms & Data Structures · Open roads cost 0, closed cost 1 — textbook 0-1 BFS.

medium

Bank Tellers: Wait Time

Algorithms & Data Structures · A min-heap simulation, then binary search on the answer.

medium

First Word Containing a Prefix

Algorithms & Data Structures · lower_bound on the prefix itself — the follow-ups are the round.

easy

Stateful Search Autocomplete Session

Algorithms & Data Structures · LC 642: a typing session over historical search frequencies.

hard

Reverse Count-and-Say

Algorithms & Data Structures · Parse (count, digit) pairs backward — adjacent runs must differ.

hard

Asked on LeetCode

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