36 questions · from 8 interviews · 2 asked more than once
Motive interview questions
Every question candidates reported from their Motive interviews, most frequently asked first. Each links to the write-up it came from, so you can see the round and how it went.
Motive coding and DSA questions
- 01
Group Anagrams
Given an array of strings strs, group the anagrams together. You can return the answer in any order. An Anagram is a word or phrase formed by rearranging the letters of a different word or phrase, typically using all the original letters exactly once.
Medium · Asked 2 times · From Motive (Keep Truckin) | INTERVIEW EXPERIENCE | Staff Engineer
- 02
Search in Rotated Sorted Array
Find an element through a rotated sorted array.
Medium · Asked 2 times · From Motive interview experience
- 03
Find Triplet with Target Sum (Constant Space)
Given an array, find a triplet of elements whose sum equals a specified target. The problem required a solution with constant space complexity.
Medium · From Motive (Keep Truckin) | INTERVIEW EXPERIENCE | Staff Engineer
- 04
Best Time to Buy and Sell Stock
Design an algorithm to find the maximum profit you can achieve by buying and selling a stock. You may complete at most one transaction.
Easy · From Motive (Keep Truckin) | INTERVIEW EXPERIENCE | Staff Engineer
- 05
Valid Parenthesis String
Given a string s containing only three types of characters: '(', ')', and '', return true if s is valid. The validity rules are: 1. Any left parenthesis '(' must have a corresponding right parenthesis ')'. 2. Any right parenthesis ')' must have a…
Hard · From Motive (Keep Truckin) | INTERVIEW EXPERIENCE | Staff Engineer
- 06
Search a 2D Matrix II
Efficiently searching a row-wise and column-wise sorted matrix ($O(m + n)$ approach).
Medium · From Motive | Interview Experience | Rejected at HLD
- 07
Contiguous Array
Finding the maximum length of a contiguous subarray with an equal number of 0s and 1s (Prefix Sum + Hashmap).
Medium · From Motive | Interview Experience | Rejected at HLD
- 08
Palindrome Permutation II
Generate all palindromic permutations of a string. Used a frequency map and backtracking.
Hard · From Motive | Interview Experience | Rejected at HLD
- 09
Minimum Swaps to Group All 1's Together II
Focused on the sliding window approach for a circular array.
Hard · From Motive | Interview Experience | Rejected at HLD
- 10
Pair Shoes of Same Sizes
Given a shoe rack which may have left and right shoe of different sizes. You need to tell whether you can pair all right and left shoes together of same sizes. Return true or false.
- 11
Valid Parenthesis String with Wildcard
Given a string of opening and closing parenthesis along with as special character. you can replace with either opening or closing parenthesis. Need to tell whether the string is valid or not. Conditions for validity - for each opening there should be…
- 12
Evaluate Arithmetic Expression String
Given a string which contains numbers as well as operators. You need to find the final solution for this string after solvinf it mathematically. Edge cases : divide by zero, negative numbers, etc
- 13
Restore IP Addresses
Given a string of numbers you need to return a list of valid IPV4 addresses that can be formed using this string. You just need tio insert dots in between.
- 14
Least Common Ancestor
A question on finding the Least Common Ancestor (LCA).
- 15
Merge Sorted Array
You are given two integer arrays nums1 and nums2 , sorted in non-decreasing order, and two integers m and n , representing the number of elements in nums1 and nums2 respectively. Merge nums2 into nums1 such that nums1 becomes a single sorted array. The final…
Easy · From Motive | SDE 2 | Worst Experience - Horrible treatment
- 16
Basic Calculator
Implement a basic calculator to evaluate a simple expression string. The expression string may contain open '(' and closing parentheses ')', the plus '+' or minus '-' sign, non-negative integers and empty spaces ' '.
Hard · From Motive (KeepTruckin) | Software Engineer | Remote | June 2023 [Reject]
- 17
Valid Palindrome
A phrase is a palindrome if, after converting all uppercase letters into lowercase letters and removing all non-alphanumeric characters, it reads the same forward and backward. Alphanumeric characters include letters and numbers.
Easy · From Motive (KeepTruckin) | Software Engineer | Remote | June 2023 [Reject]
- 18
Palindrome Permutation
Given a string s, return true if a permutation of the string could form a palindrome. Otherwise, return false.
Easy · From Motive (KeepTruckin) | Software Engineer | Remote | June 2023 [Reject]
- 19
Valid Anagram
Given two strings s and t, return true if t is an anagram of s, and false otherwise. An Anagram is a word or phrase formed by rearranging the letters of a different word or phrase, typically using all the original letters exactly once.
Easy · From Motive (KeepTruckin) | Software Engineer | Remote | June 2023 [Reject]
- 20
Find All Anagrams in a String
Given two strings s and p, return an array of all the start indices of p's anagrams in s. You may return the answer in any order.
Medium · From Motive (KeepTruckin) | Software Engineer | Remote | June 2023 [Reject]
Motive system design questions
- 01
High-Level Design: Movie Ticket Booking System
Design a high-level system for a movie ticket booking platform, including discussions on the availability engine, price engine, and other relevant components.
From Motive (Keep Truckin) | INTERVIEW EXPERIENCE | Staff Engineer
- 02
High-Level Design: Load Handling & Logistics System
Design a high-level system for load handling and logistics, including aspects like scheduling pickups and estimating capacity for loads. The interviewer suggested leveraging concepts from Uber's design.
From Motive (Keep Truckin) | INTERVIEW EXPERIENCE | Staff Engineer
- 03
Discuss a Project and Database Choices
I was asked to talk about a project that I'm proud of. This was a conversation with basic questions on choice of database.
- 04
Design BookMyShow Database Schema
I was asked to design a table schema for a platform similar to BookMyShow. I created a very vivid and normalized schema showing artists, movies, theatres, halls, shows, users, bookings, cities with primary and foreign keys.
- 05
High-Level Design: Search Autocomplete Feature
Design a High-Level Design (HLD) for a Search Autocomplete feature.
From Motive | Software Engineer Backend | Interview Experience
- 06
High-Level Design Aspects
Discussion on High-Level Design (HLD) aspects including database choices, system scalability, system performance, and justifications for design decisions.
- 07
Cars Sold API Endpoint Implementation
Given yearly distributed API endpoints holding cars sold on that particular year, expose a new API endpoint which will take an year as query parameter and return the list of cars which were sold for last 10 years from the input year but not sold in recent 2…
- 08
Design Event Booking System
Design an event booking system. My response covered APIs, user interaction flows, database schema design, and strategies for handling concurrent bookings for the same seats.
From Motive (KeepTruckin) | Software Engineer | Remote | June 2023 [Reject]
Motive behavioural and HR questions
- 01
Project Implementation Details
Discuss your project implementation details, including design decisions and justifications.
- 02
Contributions and Feature Implementation
Describe your contributions to the team and how you implemented specific features.
- 03
Managerial and Behavioral Questions
Managerial questions covering conflicts with teammates, weaknesses and plans to overcome them, communication regarding missed deadlines, perceived strengths by manager and self, past setbacks and how they were overcome, and general questions related to team…
Motive other questions
- 01
Implement Nominatim API for Geocoding
Write a method to call the Nominatim API and return an address for a given pair of longitude and latitude. API documentation: https://nominatim.org/release-docs/develop/api/Overview/
From Motive (Keep Truckin) | INTERVIEW EXPERIENCE | Staff Engineer
- 02
Parse CSV and Extract House Number
Write a method to read a CSV file (from https://raw.githubusercontent.com/kelvins/US-Cities-Database/main/csv/uscities.csv ) and return the housenumber. Note: The provided CSV file does not contain a 'housenumber' column, suggesting the problem might have…
From Motive (Keep Truckin) | INTERVIEW EXPERIENCE | Staff Engineer
- 03
Implement OSRM API for Route Calculation
Write a method to calculate the route between two cities using the OSRM API. The cities can be sourced from the data parsed in question 2. API documentation: http://project-osrm.org/docs/v5.23.0/api/route-service
From Motive (Keep Truckin) | INTERVIEW EXPERIENCE | Staff Engineer
- 04
Build REST APIs for Geo-services
Build REST APIs to expose the functionalities implemented in the previous three methods (Nominatim geocoding, CSV parsing, OSRM route calculation).
From Motive (Keep Truckin) | INTERVIEW EXPERIENCE | Staff Engineer
- 05
API Integration (Nominatim & OSRM)
My task involved using the Nominatim API to retrieve the postal address for a given latitude-longitude pair, then extending this to process a list of pairs from a CSV file. Additionally, I had to utilize the OSRM API to calculate a route between two specified…
From Motive (KeepTruckin) | Software Engineer | Remote | June 2023 [Reject]
Motive interview questions FAQ
What questions are asked in Motive interviews?
Candidates reported 36 distinct questions across 8 Motive interviews. 20 coding and DSA questions, 8 system design questions, 3 behavioural and HR questions, 5 other questions.
Which Motive interview questions are asked most often?
The most repeated are "Group Anagrams" (2 times), "Search in Rotated Sorted Array" (2 times).
How difficult are Motive interview questions?
Of the questions candidates rated, 33% were easy, 40% medium and 27% hard.