It's a 3.5-hour interview with only a 15-minute break. The interview process was alright. They do nitpick, so brush up on every little detail you can think of.

I provided an O(n) solution using a sliding window for something that would have otherwise taken a nested for loop. They said it was a complicated solution and that they were looking for an O(n) solution (a sliding window solution is indeed an O(n) solution), and I covered 2/3 of the edge cases.

You're going to have to get lucky. Your general problem-solving skills aren't going to cut it. Your real-life SWE skills will not help you in these interviews. Look into failure handling for batch processing, caching strategies, and eviction policies.

A sliding window problem, a video streaming platform, a service where you pull some data in batches.