Bridge·Software Engineer·Onsite - System Design / Architecture
Jul 2026
Bridge SWE interview that was basically one big system design question dressed up as a coding problem. They wanted a full Minesweeper implementation plus a follow-up on scaling it to huge sparse boards, which honestly felt like two separate interviews crammed into one.
- Design and implement a Minesweeper game: initialize an m×n board with k randomly placed bombs, implement a printBoard() method that returns the current player-visible state, and implement a click(r, c) method that handles bomb hits, cell reveals, and BFS/DFS flood fill for zero-adjacent-bomb regions. Discuss data structures, algorithms, and time/space complexity, and provide test cases.
- For very large, sparse boards (huge m and n, but very few bombs), how would you optimize click() to be fast and memory-efficient? Walk through options like lazy board generation, sparse data structures, on-demand neighbor counting, caching, and pruning, and discuss the trade-offs.
“I started with a 2D array for the board and a separate boolean grid for revealed state, which felt clean at first.”