Anrok·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen
Jun 2026
Anrok software engineering interview that was basically one big design question about batching async HTTP requests. Pretty involved for a single problem, they wanted the whole thing: data structures, edge cases, failure modes, complexity analysis. Left feeling like I covered maybe 70% of what they were looking for.
- You have a backend endpoint GET /read?keys=k1,k2,... that returns a JSON map of key-value pairs. Given two primitives, httpGetAsync and parseKvs, implement a getKeyAsync(key, callback) interface that batches concurrent requests into a single HTTP call every 100ms, deduplicates keys, ensures callbacks are only resolved by the batch they arrived before, and supports multiple in-flight batches simultaneously. Also cover missing keys, partial failures, retries, cancellation, and complexity.
“This one sprawled.” The rest of the author's notes on Software Engineer interview at Anrok, Technical Phone Screen round, covers how they worked through the question, what the panel pushed back on, and what they would do differently.
View Post