The first live coding session started with general questions about my experience and then moved on to a LeetCode-style exercise: given strings A and B, find the starting index of an anagram of string B within string A. I also had to discuss Big O notation and, after coming up with a brute-force solution, find a more optimal one. The total time was about 1.5 hours.

The second live coding session began with more generic questions about software development and then progressed to another LeetCode-style exercise: given an array of positive integers A and a target T, find a continuous subarray of A that adds up to the target T. After devising a brute-force solution and explaining its complexity, I was asked to improve the solution and consider how to solve it for both positive and negative integers. The total time was about 1.5 hours.

The third interview was a system design session. It started with more general software development questions, and then I was asked to design a rate limiter for two REST endpoints that were authenticated by an API key and ran on a single server. I had to come up with an API key format, discuss different versions for coding the rate limiter, and explain how I would change my approach for multiple server instances. The total time was about 1.5 hours.

After the third interview, I withdrew from the process as it had already taken too much time, and there were a few more interviews in the pipeline.

See the interview process description.