Akuna Capital Interview Questions — Page 1

Akuna Capital·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Feb 2024

Data engineer interview at Akuna Capital with a SQL-focused technical question. Pretty straightforward if you know your aggregations and set operations, but the ordering requirement at the end is easy to fumble under pressure.

Given two tables, cpu_metrics and memory_metrics, each with an application_id and usage_percentage column, write a query to find all applications where the average usage_percentage exceeds 50% during February 2024. Return a label indicating the resource type ('CPU' or 'Memory'), the application_id, and the rounded average. Combine both result sets and sort by application_id, then type.

“The UNION ALL part felt obvious but I second-guessed myself on whether to use UNION vs UNION ALL.”

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Akuna Capital·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Apr 2026

Quant Engineer interview at Akuna Capital with a pretty gnarly algorithmic problem involving array sorting and cycle detection. One question, but it had enough depth to chew on for a while.

Given an array of integers that may contain duplicates, find the minimum number of swaps needed to sort it in non-decreasing order.

“The core insight is modeling it as a graph where each index points to where its value belongs in the sorted array, then counting cycles.”

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Akuna Capital·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Apr 2026

Got a coding question from Akuna Capital for a software engineering role that was basically a class design problem. Pretty straightforward OOP stuff but the edge cases in the spec required some careful reading.

Design and implement a CommsHandler abstract base class and a CommunicationException class. CommsHandler should support connecting two callers, hanging up, and clearing all connections, with specific exception handling for cases like self-connection, busy lines, and invalid hangup attempts.

“The spec looks simple but there are a lot of little branches to get right.”

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Akuna Capital·Data Scientist·Technical Phone Screen

Apr 2026

Akuna Capital data scientist interview that went deep on streaming statistics, way deeper than I expected for a DS role. The whole thing was basically one extended design problem with follow-ups that kept getting harder.

Design a data structure that continuously ingests a stream of integers and supports querying the maximum, mean, and mode at any point. Walk through your update and query operations and their time and space complexity.
If the integer values are guaranteed to fall within [1, 1001], what exact solution would you use to track the mode, and how much memory does it require?
If the value domain is unbounded or memory is limited, how would you approximate the mode, and what accuracy trade-offs does that introduce?
Extend the design to support querying max, mean, and mode over only the most recent k elements as a sliding window. How do you maintain these statistics as the window moves, what is the complexity, and how do you handle ties and empty windows?

“I started with the obvious stuff: running sum and count for mean, a max-heap for maximum.”

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Akuna Capital·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Apr 2026

Akuna Capital software engineer interview with a meaty low-level systems question. The kind of problem that sounds straightforward until you're actually in it and realize how many edge cases you glossed over in your head.

Implement a fixed-capacity circular buffer using an array, supporting push, pop, peek, isEmpty, isFull, and size, all in O(1) time. You also need to define what happens when you push to a full buffer, support iteration in logical order, and discuss how you'd make it thread-safe with blocking push/pop using condition variables.

“I knew the ring buffer mechanics well enough but tripped up when they asked me to commit to a policy for full-buffer pushes and actually document it.”

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Akuna Capital·Software Engineer·Onsite - Coding / Algorithms

Apr 2026

Akuna Capital coding round for a software engineer role. Three algorithmic problems back to back, all C++, all with tight complexity targets. The problems were genuinely hard and covered a weird mix of topics.

You have an inventory array where each element is the starting sale price for that item type. Every time you sell a unit of a type, its price drops by 1 (flooring at 0). You need to make exactly a given number of sales to maximize total revenue. Return the result modulo 1e9+7. Inventory can be up to 2e5 elements, orders up to 1e13, prices up to 1e9.
Given an integer array and two bounds minVal and maxVal, count the number of subarrays whose minimum is exactly minVal and whose maximum is exactly maxVal. Must run in O(n) time with O(1) extra space.
Given a binary matrix, two rows are considered equivalent if you can flip any subset of columns to turn one into the other. Count the number of unordered pairs of equivalent rows. Rows up to 1e5, columns up to 30. Target complexity involves bitmask or hashing tricks.

“This one wrecked me at first.”

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Akuna Capital·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

May 2026

Interviewed for a software engineer role at Akuna Capital. Two questions, both pretty algorithmic. Nothing too wild but the tracing question had some gotchas I didn't fully anticipate going in.

Given a short pseudo-code snippet with a loop and conditionals operating over an integer array, trace the values of key variables step by step for a given input, state the final result, identify the time and space complexity, and flag any off-by-one errors.
Given a case-insensitive string, return the most frequently occurring character. If there's a tie, return the lexicographically smallest one. Walk through an O(n) solution and discuss the space trade-offs involved.

“The tracing part was fine until I rushed the last iteration and got the final value wrong.”

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Akuna Capital·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

May 2026

Akuna Capital software engineer interview with a design-focused coding round. The question started simple enough but had a follow-up that really tested whether you knew your patterns.

Design an Enemy factory for a multiplayer game that returns an enemy instance of a given color. Start with the basic factory and class hierarchy, then redesign it to handle massive memory usage when thousands of enemies are spawned.

“The first part was fine, factory method, base Enemy class, color property, nothing crazy.”

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Akuna Capital·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

May 2026

Interviewed for a software engineering role at Akuna Capital and ran into a MySQL foreign key question that seemed straightforward but had a subtle wrinkle worth thinking through.

In MySQL, which of the following is false: (A) a column can have a foreign key reference to itself, (B) MySQL supports foreign key references between columns within the same table, (C) the data types of corresponding foreign key and referenced key columns must be compatible, or (D) all of the above are correct?

“I second-guessed myself on this one.”

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Akuna Capital·Software Engineer·Online Assessment (OA)

May 2026

SQL-heavy online assessment for a software engineer role at Akuna Capital. Multiple choice format covering joins, window functions, NULL behavior, and query processing order. Had to justify answers too, which tripped me up more than I expected.

What is the difference in behavior between INNER JOIN, LEFT JOIN, and RIGHT JOIN, and when would each produce different result sets?
How does HAVING differ from WHERE, and in what scenarios must you use HAVING instead of WHERE?
How does SQL handle NULL values in comparison operations and aggregate functions?
What is the difference between ROW_NUMBER and RANK window functions, and how do they handle ties?
In what order does SQL logically process the clauses of a query (FROM, WHERE, GROUP BY, HAVING, SELECT, ORDER BY)?

“Thought I had this cold but the multiple choice options were sneaky.”

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