Meta Coding & DSA interview questions

The most common screen opener, and interviewers use it to check whether hashmap thinking is reflexive. Here's the one-pass answer, the narration that earns points, and the duplicate-handling edge case most candidates fumble.

A 5-minute warm-up that quietly tests the most useful idea in practical coding: choosing a canonical key. The sorted-string vs character-count tradeoff is exactly what interviewers want to hear you reason about.

The interval pattern shows up everywhere in FDE loops: calendars, flight segments, log windows. Master the sort-then-sweep idiom here and three other interview questions fall out for free.

The follow-up interviewers reach for when merge-intervals goes too smoothly. The three-phase scan is elegant, but only if you've internalized the overlap condition most candidates have to re-derive under pressure.

Top-K is the most reused primitive in FDE interviews: it reappears inside log parsers, analytics questions, and retrieval ranking. Three solutions exist; knowing which one to lead with is the real test.

Looks like a sliding-window problem; isn't one. The prefix-sum + hashmap trick that solves it is the same idea behind sessionization and cumulative-metrics questions later in the loop: learn it once, reuse it three times.

Everyone knows the sort + two-pointer outline. The interview is actually about duplicate handling: three separate skip conditions that candidates routinely botch live. Here's the clean version and the narration that goes with it.

The single most-asked design-a-data-structure question in FDE loops. There's an interview-legal Python shortcut and a from-scratch version, and knowing when to offer which is half the grade.

K-way merge is the algorithm behind log aggregation, search-result merging, and LSM trees, which is exactly why FDE loops keep asking it. The heap version is table stakes; the tie-breaking detail is where candidates crash.

The canonical grid question, and the template for every flood-fill, shortest-path, and region-labeling variant FDE loops throw at you. BFS vs DFS vs union-find: here's which to write and which to merely mention.

The follow-up to number-of-islands, and the question where candidates reveal whether they understand WHY BFS finds shortest paths. Plus the two variants (weights, eliminating obstacles) that decide hard-screen outcomes at xAI.

The third member of the grid trilogy, and the one that tests backtracking discipline: marking, unmarking, and the early-exit pruning that turns a timeout into a pass.

A tree question that's secretly a format-design question, which is why FDE loops love it. The preorder-with-null-markers trick is clean, but the delimiter and malformed-input follow-ups are where offers are decided.

The Palantir coding-screen classic. It looks like merge-intervals but needs a different weapon, the sweep line, and the boundary-tie detail decides whether your answer is right or off by a planeload.

The assign-then-update loop is ten lines; the signal is whether you handle the three things that bite in production: initialization, an empty cluster, and a real convergence test instead of a fixed iteration count.

There is no training, just storage; the work is at query time. The signal is whether you vectorize the distance computation, break ties sensibly, and know when O(n) per query forces you onto an ANN index instead.

The whole question is the representation: store only the nonzeros as index→value, then either two-pointer over sorted indices or hash-join. The follow-up that decides the design is what happens when one vector is dense.

An ML coding screen that doubles as a calculus check. Interviewers watch whether you can write the MSE gradient without looking it up, explain what the learning rate actually does, and say out loud when you'd just solve the normal equation instead.

A DP classic that screens for one thing: can you define the right subproblem and fill the table without fumbling the indices. The strong version adds the O(min(m,n)) space trick and reconstructs the actual edits when the follow-up lands.

A sliding window with a last-seen index map, O(n) in one pass. The whole interview turns on one subtlety: when you hit a repeat, the window's left edge must jump forward and never slide backward, which is exactly the bug most candidates ship.

Build the output from prefix products on a left-to-right pass, then fold in suffix products on a right-to-left pass using the output array itself as scratch. O(n) time, O(1) extra space. The interesting part is why division is banned and what it costs when the input has zeros.

A sorted array got rotated at an unknown pivot and you still have to find a target in O(log n). The trick is deciding which half is sorted at every step. Here's the clean invariant, and the duplicates follow-up that quietly breaks the log-n promise.

Almost everyone writes the version that only compares each node to its immediate children, and almost every interviewer has a counterexample ready. The fix is to carry a valid (low, high) range down the recursion, or to check that an inorder traversal is strictly increasing.

The longest path between any two nodes need not pass through the root, which is what trips people up. The clean answer is one DFS that returns each node's height while updating a global best as it goes. First, nail down whether diameter counts edges or nodes.

A path can start and end anywhere and bends through at most one node, values can be negative, and you want the maximum sum. The move is a DFS that returns the best downward gain (clamped at zero) while a global max tracks the best path that bridges through each node.

The tell is whether you avoid the trap of sorting all n points when you only need k. Two real answers: a max-heap of size k at O(n log k), or quickselect at O(n) average. Knowing which one the interviewer wants is the actual question.

A two-part screen that looks like a warm-up and isn't. Part one is the classic stack validator with three bracket types; part two flips to generating every valid string of n pairs, and the Catalan count is the detail that catches people off guard.

You have a coin that lands heads with some unknown probability p. Build a fair 50/50 flip from it without knowing p. The von Neumann trick is two lines; the part that scores is explaining why the bias cancels and how many flips it costs.

The gentlest 'design a class' question in FDE screens, and the warm-up interviewers use before rate limiters and sessionization. The deque trick is easy; the API and time-window follow-ups are where the signal is.

A verbatim-reported multi-part at OpenAI and Anthropic. Each level breaks the previous design on purpose: the burst-at-the-boundary flaw is planted, and naming it before the interviewer does is how you win the round.

The coding question that doubles as a RAG-fundamentals check. Greedy packing is easy; the oversized-sentence case, the overlap-progress trap, and the tests you write unprompted are what AI-lab interviewers actually score.

A confirmed Anthropic live-coding question that looks exotic and reduces to one operation: diff consecutive call stacks against their common prefix. The recursion edge case is where strong candidates separate from finished-but-wrong ones.

Anthropic-style screens open with deceptively simple builds like this, then extend them three times. The grade isn't the counting; it's whether your first version survives the extensions without a rewrite.

The quintessential FDE practical: messy real-world input, grouping, ranking, and a hidden rubric line for how you treat malformed data. Most candidates parse happily and lose the round on the lines that don't parse.