Summary
I recently had a phone screening interview with Coupang for a Staff Software Engineer position in Bangalore. The interview primarily focused on an algorithmic problem involving finding the distance between the two closest islands in a grid.
Full Experience
I am currently a Staff Software Engineer at Walmart with 6.5 years of experience. I recently went through a Phone Screening round for a Staff Software Engineer role with Coupang's Rocket Growth Team in Bangalore. The interview lasted 60 minutes and was centered around a specific data structures and algorithms problem.
Interview Questions (1)
Given a grid[][] containing 0s and 1s, where '0' represents water and '1' represents the land. Given that an island is a group of land (1s) surrounded by water (0s) on all sides.
The task is to find the distance between the two closest islands such that:
- Distance between two islands is the minimum number of '0' between two islands.
- Only 4 - directional movement is allowed.
- There are at least 2 islands present in the grid.
Input: grid =
{{1, 1, 0, 1, 1},
{1, 1, 0, 0, 0},
{0, 0, 0, 0, 0},
{0, 0, 1, 1, 1}}
Output: 1
Explanation: There are three islands present in the grid.
Nearest pair of islands have only 1 zero (bolded in input grid) in between them.
Input: grid =
{{1, 0, 0, 0, 1},
{1, 1, 0, 0, 0},
{0, 0, 0, 0, 0},
{0, 0, 1, 1, 1}}
Output: 2
Explanation: There are three islands present in the grid.
Nearest pair of islands have 2 zeroes in between them (depicted by bold 0 in input grid).
In this case there are multiple pair of islands having a distance of 2 between them.
Summary
I had my first coding round for a Staff position at Coupang. The interview focused on designing a data structure to manage string counts and efficiently retrieve strings with minimum and maximum counts.
Full Experience
I had my first coding round for a Staff position at Coupang. It was a 1-hour coding question conducted on an online code pairing platform. The interviewer expected an optimal working code. The problem asked me to design a data structure to store the count of strings, with the ability to efficiently return strings with minimum and maximum counts. Specifically, I needed to implement inc(String key), dec(String key), getMaxKey(), and getMinKey(), all targeting an average O(1) time complexity.
Interview Questions (1)
Design a data structure to store the count of strings with the ability to return the strings with minimum and maximum counts.
Implement the class:
inc(String key)- Increments the count of the string key by 1dec(String key)- Decrements the count of the string key by 1getMaxKey()- Returns one of the keys with the maximal countgetMinKey()- Returns one of the keys with the minimum count
Summary
I recently interviewed at Coupang and was presented with LeetCode problem 296, Best Meeting Point, as a coding challenge.
Full Experience
During my interview process with Coupang, the primary focus was a coding task. I was presented with LeetCode problem 296, known as 'Best Meeting Point', and had to work through its solution.
Interview Questions (1)
Summary
I recently completed a 60-minute phone screening for an SSE role at Coupang Bangalore, where I discussed a space-optimized Minimum Stack implementation, though the interviewer seemed to expect a different approach.
Full Experience
I'm currently an SSE at Walmart with 6 years of experience. I recently had a phone screening for Coupang in Bangalore. The interview lasted 60 minutes, and my interviewer was from Korea. We discussed the implementation of a Minimum Stack in O(1) time. I tried explaining my space-optimized approach without an auxiliary stack, but it seemed the interviewer was looking for a solution that used one. I'm not sure if he fully understood my method, and I regret not clarifying his preferred implementation beforehand. I'll update this thread with the outcome.
Interview Questions (1)
Implement a data structure for a Minimum Stack where all operations (push, pop, top, getMin) should execute in O(1) time complexity.