1. Phone Screen:

The first interviewer never called, which was unfortunate. However, the recruiters were happy to reschedule whenever I was ready. (I say "recruiters" because it is common that you email your recruiter, they are away for the day, and your message is auto-directed to another recruiter. I had contact with four different people on the recruiting team during my experience.)

The phone screen went well. There were approximately 10 minutes of small talk, a technical coding problem (LeetCode medium difficulty, but with simpler constraints for the phone screen), and then a follow-up system design problem (because I have some working experience).

1. On-Sites:

Five interviews were conducted.

• The first four were data structures/algorithms/"coding."
  • The first interview was somewhat soft, wherein they spent 12.5 minutes on soft questions, another 12.5 minutes on abstract technical questions (e.g., what trade-offs exist between two different algorithms to solve a simple problem), and then 20 minutes on a coding question. The coding question was very simple (a string processing question).
  • The next three interviews were challenging. They featured very difficult questions. One was a LeetCode hard dynamic programming question taken directly from the site. The next was a very confusing tree question. The one after that was a unique dynamic programming question. They were all very challenging, but I likely should have been better prepared.
  • The final interview was system design. The specific question doesn't matter as much, as they are more interested in exploring your understanding of whatever you propose, your ability to identify shortcomings and limitations, and your capacity to suggest remedies or alternatives.

You are given a string that may contain consecutive, duplicate characters (e.g., "aaabcdddefffffggaaa").

Can you count the number of times characters appear more than 3 times in consecutive order? (Answer: 4)

Can you return the max-length run of consecutive, duplicate characters? (Answer: 5)

Can you print the input, printing up to N consecutive characters in a row, but no more? (e.g., if N=2, then the answer would be: "aabcddeffggaa")

Can you reverse the string in-place?

(Note: not all of these questions were asked, but they represent the type of questions you can be asked.)