InterviewLegend

Named Medium Problems

Alex Chen35 min readUpdated 20 real interview reports

SpaceX does not hand you a puzzle bank, so most of this section works scenarios rather than named problems. Two named mediums are the exception. A Premium question turns up by name in candidate accounts, including on the flight-software side, and a trimmed a Premium question turns up in onsites too. Neither is worked anywhere else in this guide, so both are here in full. A third problem rides along: a Premium question that has to stay correct when a producer and a consumer touch it at once, the concurrency ask that fits SpaceX's real-time, embedded world.

The SpaceX angle
Famous as these two are, SpaceX still grades them its own way. The bar rewards clean, working code and a calm account of the structure underneath. The win on each is finishing: a grid flood fill that terminates, a lookup that binary-searches instead of scanning, a queue whose capacity rule holds under contention. Expect the homemade edge SpaceX is known for. One candidate had to reconcile the Time-Based store's inconsistent examples out loud. A live interviewer may hand you a rough version of the queue and ask you to make the thread-safety explicit. Build first, and defend as you go.
What's inside
  • 3 problems, worked step by step
  • about 35 min

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5 coding · 1 system design · 15 behavioral questions

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