Summary
I recently interviewed for a frontend position at xAI, which involved challenging questions spanning UI/frontend development, data structures, and system design.
Full Experience
My interview experience at xAI for a frontend role was quite comprehensive. I was presented with three distinct challenges. The first involved building a TypeAhead component with debounce and highlighted filtered text, focusing on interactive UI elements and performance. Next, I tackled a LeetCode-style problem concerning finding the length of a subsequent growing sequence in an array, testing my algorithmic skills. Finally, a significant frontend system design question required me to architect a UI for managing prompt history and context with an OpenAI API, demonstrating my ability to handle complex API interactions and state management.
Interview Questions (3)
Implement a TypeAhead component that suggests filtered results as the user types. The component should incorporate a debounce mechanism to limit API calls or filtering frequency. Additionally, the filtered text within the suggestions should be highlighted.
Given an array of numbers, find the length of the longest subsequent growing sequence. A subsequent growing sequence is a sequence of elements from the original array that are in increasing order, but not necessarily contiguous. (This strongly implies Longest Increasing Subsequence - LIS).
Design and implement a user interface (UI) with two main sections: on the left, a history of user prompts; on the right, a prompt input area and a display for the current context. The system should allow users to input new prompts, fetching data from an OpenAI endpoint API. Crucially, selecting any prompt from the history should load its previous response as the 'context' for a new API request, allowing for conversational or iterative interactions with the OpenAI API.