Operating Systems & Systems Programming Topics
Covers operating system fundamentals and systems programming topics, including process management, memory management, file system interfaces, inter-process communication, low-level kernel interactions, and system call interfaces (e.g., fork, exec, opendir, stat) across Unix/Linux and other OS environments.
Background Work and Battery Optimization
Practical knowledge of background execution models and strategies to minimize power consumption on mobile devices. Topics include scheduling frameworks and patterns such as work manager job scheduler services and foreground services, batching and deferring work, handling platform features like doze mode and app standby, efficient location and sensor handling, minimizing wake locks and network usage, retry and exponential backoff strategies, and measuring battery impact with platform profilers. Candidates should be able to pick the right background mechanism for a requirement reason about timeliness versus power trade offs and describe concrete steps to reduce CPU GPU and network induced battery drain.
Advanced Mobile Platform Expertise
Deep mastery of mobile platform internals and advanced application programming interfaces across iOS and Android. Assess the ability to explain complex technical concepts and to apply fundamental principles to novel problems. On iOS this includes Grand Central Dispatch and other concurrency primitives, memory management patterns and retain cycle diagnosis, Swift concurrency and reactive paradigms, view rendering performance, and profiling and debugging user interface and memory issues. On Android this includes Kotlin coroutines and flow, threading models and synchronization, Android Jetpack component interactions, custom view composition and rendering performance, and garbage collection and memory profiling practices. Candidates should be able to reason about platform internals, design thread safe and efficient solutions, evaluate cross platform tradeoffs, and articulate low level debugging and performance optimization approaches.
Mobile Constraints and Resource Management
Assessment of design strategies for resource constrained mobile environments. Topics include battery and energy optimization background work scheduling storage budgeting and cleanup client side caching and offline strategies adaptive behavior for variable network conditions and graceful degradation for limited device capabilities. Candidates should discuss patterns such as offline first syncing delta updates payload compression lazy loading and device capability detection as well as measurement and monitoring approaches to validate improvements.