Software Engineer Data Interview Questions

415 software engineer data interview questions shared by candidates

Problem: o A traveler flies to many cities (airports) in an unbroken chain of flights with no loops i.e never revisiting an airport. o For every flight, she has a boarding pass with only a From (City) and To (City) printed on it but no date/time. o At the end of her journey, she hands you all her boarding passes but they’re shuffled, so you don’t know the starting or the ending city. Can you: o Write logic or pseudocode to print her whole journey in sequence. It should print e.g. (Starting) City1 -> City2 ->….-> (Ending) CityX o State the time complexity of your solution. o you’re given a Set of BoardingPass objects as input. o there could be as many as hundreds of thousands of unique cities/airports. o memory is no concern (i.e. you have infinite memory!). Optimize for execution time (time complexity).
May 19, 2016

Problem: o A traveler flies to many cities (airports) in an unbroken chain of flights with no loops i.e never revisiting an airport. o For every flight, she has a boarding pass with only a From (City) and To (City) printed on it but no date/time. o At the end of her journey, she hands you all her boarding passes but they’re shuffled, so you don’t know the starting or the ending city. Can you: o Write logic or pseudocode to print her whole journey in sequence. It should print e.g. (Starting) City1 -> City2 ->….-> (Ending) CityX o State the time complexity of your solution. o you’re given a Set of BoardingPass objects as input. o there could be as many as hundreds of thousands of unique cities/airports. o memory is no concern (i.e. you have infinite memory!). Optimize for execution time (time complexity).

Despite my mentioning that I had only heard about map-reduce at talks, and not really used it, he decided to ask me a question on the same subject. How would you solve this ML problem using map-reduce? Another question was, what type of problems would you be interested in solving given a large amount twitter data. These were essentially the two "substantive" questions that he asked me, which I presume he'd be using to judge my candidacy!
May 1, 2013

Despite my mentioning that I had only heard about map-reduce at talks, and not really used it, he decided to ask me a question on the same subject. How would you solve this ML problem using map-reduce? Another question was, what type of problems would you be interested in solving given a large amount twitter data. These were essentially the two "substantive" questions that he asked me, which I presume he'd be using to judge my candidacy!

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