Large Scale Computing Interview Questions
- 0of 0 votes
AnswersWe have a quote file with millions of entries. Design a system to read from the system and return a random quote always with O(1) time. We can read the file once and can keep in memory but should not re read the same. Also when you restart your system, it should preserve and work with O(1) complexity.
- johnsvakel March 26, 2018 in India| Report Duplicate | Flag | PURGE
Adobe Data Scientist Large Scale Computing Math & Computation Object Oriented Design - 0of 0 votes
AnswerI was asked a very vague design question. How to design the backend architecture of a worldwide application (e.g. yelp)? I'm not sure what kind of questions I need to ask to narrow down this question and what kind of answer I need to give. The interviewer asked me to list technologies that I plan to use.
- ZigZagZebraZZ June 02, 2017 in United States| Report Duplicate | Flag | PURGE
Large Scale Computing - 0of 0 votes
AnswersWe tend to use computer to solve practical problems that actually earns or save dollars. Here is something that happens across the stock exchanges : people buy and sell stocks.
- NoOne October 15, 2016 in India
We generally use automated intelligent systems to buy and sell stocks. That part is too much mathematics, and beyond scope of this interview. There is another part. Suppose the system issues a buy order : buy 1000 Microsoft stock. Now, there are more than 1 ( in fact 10 ) active exchanges from where we can buy MSFT. There is a slight price delta, which keeps changing over time. There is another problem. In each stock exchange, prices are stacked, that is :
1. For first 100 stocks prices are 55$.
2. Next 200 stocks, prices are 55.2$.
... etc, and you got the idea. Even this stacks are changing over time.
Thus, here is the problem to solve. Design and implement a system such that one can buy n stocks with minimal price.
Also, in the same spirit, the same system should be able to sell n stocks with maximum payoff possible.
This is a non trivial problem, for Quant systems.
There are always k no of exchanges to hit.| Report Duplicate | Flag | PURGE
Goldman Sachs Software Engineer / Developer Algorithm Cache Computer Architecture & Low Level Computer Science Distributed Computing Large Scale Computing Math & Computation Software Design - 2of 2 votes
Answers-How would you design Google Analytics (there are huge number of users and we need real-time analysis report)?
- Matt Chad January 20, 2016 in United States
-How would you detect trends?| Report Duplicate | Flag | PURGE
Google Software Engineer Large Scale Computing - 0of 0 votes
AnswersHow Solr/Lucene or Elasticsearch work? For what purpose are they used?
- Tom Walker June 07, 2015 in United States| Report Duplicate | Flag | PURGE
Microsoft Software Developer Data Mining Data Structures Database Large Scale Computing SQL - 0of 0 votes
AnswersWhat's Hbase, Pig, used for? Why do we need Hbase if we can use Hive to query Hadoop?
- Tom Walker June 07, 2015 in United States| Report Duplicate | Flag | PURGE
Microsoft Software Developer Data Mining Data Structures Database Distributed Computing Experience Java Knowledge Based Large Scale Computing - 0of 0 votes
AnswersWhat are different phases of Map reduce operation - I think they were looking for split, combiners, partitioners, sorting phases of whole map reduce stage.
- Tom Walker June 07, 2015 in United States| Report Duplicate | Flag | PURGE
Microsoft Software Developer Data Mining Data Structures Database Distributed Computing Java Large Scale Computing SQL - 0of 2 votes
AnswersDesign a system like friend's functionality in facebook. should have all features of facebook's friends functionality. like for each person , he can have any number of friends , he will get suggestions for new firends , showing common friends if we visits any other profile . algo should be scalable , robust .
- gopi.komanduri August 02, 2014 in United States| Report Duplicate | Flag | PURGE
Computer Scientist Algorithm Android Application / UI Design Arrays Bit Manipulation C# C++ Cache Coding Computer Architecture & Low Level Data Mining Data Structures Database Distributed Computing Dynamic Programming Hash Table Java Large Scale Computing Linked Lists Math & Computation Object Oriented Design Problem Solving Sorting SQL Stacks System Design Trees and Graphs XML - 0of 2 votes
AnswersHow to design a multi key hash map ( key count can be dynamic. if there are two keys , initiallly which can be used to find the value , keys can be increased to three as well ex: consider school structure. Intially , consider , student id is key , later , should be searchable even with key name , later with grade.
- gopi.komanduri July 05, 2014 in India| Report Duplicate | Flag | PURGE
Analyst Algorithm Arrays C# C++ Coding Data Structures Dynamic Programming Experience Hash Table Large Scale Computing Linked Lists Problem Solving Sorting Trees and Graphs - 1of 3 votes
AnswersDesign a telephone directory for large ppl (he gave example like design for India). fields will be , first name , last name , number . this should be searchable with first name , last name , number as welll.
- gopi.komanduri July 04, 2014 in India
later added more complexity like do the same for organisation where even it contains designations. so this should be searchable with designations.| Report Duplicate | Flag | PURGE
Analyst Algorithm Arrays C C++ Cache Coding Computer Architecture & Low Level Data Mining Data Structures Dynamic Programming Hash Table Ideas Large Scale Computing Linked Lists Object Oriented Design Problem Solving Trees and Graphs - 0of 2 votes
AnswersWrite a class that displays average of stock prices for a given stock symbol for the last 10 minutes. We have a service that sends stock updates about 5000 times per second. The structure of the message is :
- budsiya March 21, 2014 in United StatesMessage { long timestamp; String symbol; // E.g. AAPL double price; }
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Yahoo Software Engineer / Developer Large Scale Computing System Design - -2of 8 votes
AnswersHow to remove duplicate lines in a large text file? I think it's easy to find duplicate lines, but how do we efficiently remove them from the file?
- Guy January 30, 2014 in United States| Report Duplicate | Flag | PURGE
Google Software Engineer / Developer Large Scale Computing - 0of 0 votes
AnswersDesign the system for Amazon website where if you purchase an item X , it shows "Customers who bought X also bought A,B,C items".
- juny January 30, 2014 in United States for AFT
Assume: if a customer buys A,B,C items in his history then they are all related and each one should appear in others| Report Duplicate | Flag | PURGE
Amazon Software Engineer / Developer Large Scale Computing - -3of 3 votes
AnswersGiven that logs are being generated by may web servers, design your logs processor, to optimize for the query "get the count of the logs generated in the last 5 minutes".
- Rajesh Konda October 05, 2013 in United States| Report Duplicate | Flag | PURGE
Large Scale Computing - 0of 0 votes
AnswersHow does a site like Facebook store "Likes" ?
- bertrandreddy January 19, 2013 in United States
Whats the best approach for Space complexity and Time complexity ? Can we do it in O(1) space or at least O(n) space ?| Report Duplicate | Flag | PURGE
Google Member Technical Staff Algorithm Data Mining Data Structures Large Scale Computing - 0of 0 votes
AnswersIf there are 1 million files in Amazon database, there is a wrong area code of customer phone number. How would you debug?
- terryocy April 27, 2012 in United States| Report Duplicate | Flag | PURGE
Amazon Software Engineer / Developer Large Scale Computing - -1of 1 vote
Answershave 1 million product id, get the top 10 in the past 1 hour
- Itcecsa April 16, 2012 in United States| Report Duplicate | Flag | PURGE
Amazon Software Engineer / Developer Large Scale Computing - 0of 0 votes
Answerslarge file(can't fit into memory) with multiple lines, how to get any line in equal probability
- Itcecsa April 16, 2012 in United States| Report Duplicate | Flag | PURGE
Amazon Software Engineer / Developer Large Scale Computing - 0of 0 votes
AnswersI showed the feature 'Customers who bought also bought' on amazon.com, and asked to design and implement.
- rahulm January 06, 2012 in United States for RCX
Q. What if memory is not sufficient?
Q. How do DB tables look like?
Q. Can you state what all components are present in the system and how does the control flow after webserver receives the request?
Q. If you use multiple DB calls for every request, it may be very inefficient as you might be serving millions of requests. can you improve?| Report Duplicate | Flag | PURGE
Amazon Software Engineer / Developer Large Scale Computing - 0of 0 votes
AnswersDesign Online movie ticket system. How can you make this website faster. What would would you cache?
- rahulm January 05, 2012 in United States for RCX| Report Duplicate | Flag | PURGE
Amazon Software Engineer / Developer Large Scale Computing - 1of 1 vote
AnswersHow would you design and implement a large social network's (G+ or fb) friend recommendation system ?
- P December 08, 2011 in India| Report Duplicate | Flag | PURGE
Google Large Scale Computing - 7of 7 votes
AnswersGiven a very long list of URLs, find the first URL which is unique ( occurred exactly once ).
- AK December 06, 2011 in India
I gave a O(n) extra space and O(2n) time solution, but he was expecting O(n) time, one traversal.| Report Duplicate | Flag | PURGE
Google Software Engineer / Developer Algorithm Large Scale Computing - 0of 0 votes
AnswersHow to get ISBN numbers from the billion of files that are downloaded and how to store them?I mean reading and storing of ISBN number.
- chiranjib mondal July 08, 2011| Report Duplicate | Flag | PURGE
Google Software Engineer / Developer Large Scale Computing - 0of 0 votes
Answer2nd phone interview: This was a design question. Basic idea was that there were many clients who wanted to be updated whenever certain items arrived in Amazon's store.
- callbacker June 20, 2010
Hint: This is classic pub/sub (observer pattern). Discussion involved multicast, kind of data structures to be used, where will the state of the system be maintained, memory optimization, etc.| Report Duplicate | Flag | PURGE
Amazon Software Engineer / Developer Large Scale Computing - 1of 1 vote
AnswersIn a very complicated Java back-end system, since the load is too big, the garbage collector can not handle the memory and start having memory leaks. How to detect it and solve it?
- nixu09 March 01, 2010| Report Duplicate | Flag | PURGE
Linkedin Front-end Software Engineer Large Scale Computing - 0of 0 votes
AnswersHow would you find out all the books purchased in Bangaalore on a given day.
- Vaishnavi December 04, 2009| Report Duplicate | Flag | PURGE
Flipkart Software Engineer / Developer Large Scale Computing - 0of 0 votes
AnswersAmong a billion stars, find k closest stars
- SK October 01, 2009| Report Duplicate | Flag | PURGE
Amazon Software Engineer / Developer Large Scale Computing