Technical Fundamentals & Core Skills Topics
Core technical concepts including algorithms, data structures, statistics, cryptography, and hardware-software integration. Covers foundational knowledge required for technical roles and advanced technical depth.
Problem Solving and Analytical Thinking
Evaluates a candidate's systematic and logical approach to unfamiliar, ambiguous, or complex problems across technical, product, business, security, and operational contexts. Candidates should be able to clarify objectives and constraints, ask effective clarifying questions, decompose problems into smaller components, identify root causes, form and test hypotheses, and enumerate and compare multiple solution options. Interviewers look for clear reasoning about trade offs and edge cases, avoidance of premature conclusions, use of repeatable frameworks or methodologies, prioritization of investigations, design of safe experiments and measurement of outcomes, iteration based on feedback, validation of fixes, documentation of results, and conversion of lessons learned into process improvements. Responses should clearly communicate the thought process, justify choices, surface assumptions and failure modes, and demonstrate learning from prior problem solving experiences.
Complexity Analysis and Tradeoffs
Evaluating algorithmic complexity and engineering trade offs between time, space, maintainability, and operational cost. Candidates should be able to express complexity using big O notation, reason about amortized cost, identify bottlenecks, compare alternative solutions and explain when to optimize or accept higher complexity. Include discussion of measurement, profiling, and pragmatic trade offs such as caching versus recomputation or memory versus latency.
Intermediate Algorithm Problem Solving
Practical skills for solving medium difficulty algorithmic problems. Topics include two pointer techniques, sliding window, variations of binary search, medium level dynamic programming concepts such as recursion with memoization, breadth first search and depth first search on graphs and trees, basic graph representations, heaps and priority queues, and common string algorithms. Emphasis is on recognizing problem patterns, constructing correct brute force solutions and then applying optimizations, analyzing trade offs between time and space, and practicing systematic approaches to reach optimal or near optimal solutions.
Operating System Internals and Administration
Fundamental and advanced operating system concepts that underlie system administration across platforms. Topics include process and thread management, scheduling and concurrency, memory management and swapping, virtual memory and page replacement, input output and disk performance, file system architecture and semantics, system call interfaces, kernel parameters and tuning, authentication and permission models, boot and initialization sequences, monitoring and system performance analysis, and general techniques for debugging and diagnosing systemic operating system issues. Candidates should be able to explain not only how to perform administrative tasks but why the underlying mechanisms behave as they do and how design choices affect performance and reliability.