confluent | Software Engineer | Interview Experience
Interview Date: Not specified
Result: Not specified
Difficulty: Not specified
Interview Process
The interview consisted of a face-to-face coding test. The candidate was presented with two coding questions related to data structures and algorithms.
Technical Questions
- Data Structure Design: Given a list of documents (each with an ID and a string of words), design a data structure that outputs a list of IDs for documents containing a given query word.
- Boolean Query Evaluation: Given a query in the form of “word1 AND word2 OR word3”, design a method to evaluate it using a binary tree structure. The non-leaf nodes represent the AND and OR operations, while the leaf nodes represent the words. The task was to write a function that defines the binary tree nodes and traverses them to obtain the result.
Tips & Insights
- Focus on understanding data structures and their applications in search queries.
- Practice designing algorithms that can efficiently evaluate complex boolean expressions.