The phone screen lasted about 30 minutes and began with general questions about my background before diving into technical topics. I was asked to solve a DSA question on finding the top K frequent elements, discussing both the min-heap and bucket-sort approaches. Surprisingly, I had recently practiced a similar problem on the algorithm section of PracHub, which helped me articulate my thought process clearly. The interview continued with an onsite where I tackled system design and behavioral questions, and overall, the experience was straightforward and positive, leading to an offer that I happily accepted.

Top K Frequent Elements: given an integer array and integer k, return the k most frequent elements. Walk through both the min-heap approach (O(n log k) time) and the bucket-sort approach (O(n) time), then discuss the trade-offs in time and space, and which one you'd pick for a streaming variant where new numbers keep arriving.