Problem Solving and Communication Approach Questions

Covers the practice of solving technical problems while clearly communicating the thought process. Includes clarifying requirements, asking targeted questions, decomposing problems into subproblems, proposing brute force and optimized approaches, stating assumptions, discussing time and space complexity and trade offs, walking through examples and edge cases, and narrating debugging and recovery when stuck. Also includes collaboration during problem solving, readiness to accept hints, and ability to explain reasoning so others can follow and learn. This area is commonly tested in coding interviews and whiteboard scenarios where the candidate's communication of reasoning and process is as important as the final solution.

MediumTechnical

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Explain how you would teach the attention mechanism (self-attention) to a junior engineer: include a simple visual example, pseudo-code for the scaled dot-product attention, and describe practical debugging checks you would run to validate attention behavior in a transformer model.

HardTechnical

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Explain backpropagation in plain language for a non-math-savvy product manager. Use a short analogy, a minimal visual intuition, and then give one concrete example of how changing a hyperparameter (learning rate) affects the optimization process. State how you would check during training that learning is proceeding as expected.

MediumTechnical

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You're performing a code review and spot that a junior engineer's PR fails on rare edge cases but passes tests. Craft a response that teaches, points to a concrete reproducible example, and preserves morale. Describe what test cases you'd ask them to add and how you would follow up after fixes land.

MediumTechnical

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Implement a simple beam-search decoder in Python for sequence generation (provide pseudo-API: score_fn(prefix) -> next_token_logits). While coding, narrate how beam size affects runtime and memory, handle length normalization, and discuss edge-cases like repeated tokens and EOS handling.

MediumTechnical

0 practiced

You are given pseudocode for a training pipeline (data loading, augmentation, batching, forward/backward, checkpointing). Walk through the complexity analysis and identify likely bottlenecks. Propose at least two concrete optimizations with tradeoffs, and explain how you would communicate these changes and their expected impact to the engineering manager.

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