anchorage digital·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen
Jun 2026
Interviewed at Anchorage Digital for a backend or software engineering role. The technical round was basically one meaty design problem about building a leaderboard, which sounds straightforward but has a lot of moving parts once they start asking about complexity and real-world scale.
- Design a leaderboard system that supports score updates, top-k retrieval, element deletion, and rank lookup. Walk through the data structures you'd use, time and space complexity, and any real-world optimizations.
“I went with a sorted set approach pretty quickly, something like a balanced BST or a skip list under the hood, which covers most operations in O(log n).”