Coupang

“This is a lot to cover in one question and I think I front-loaded too much time on the CA hierarchy and didn't leave enough room for revocation.” The rest of the author's notes on Software Engineer interview at Coupang, Onsite - System Design / Architecture round, covers how they worked through the question, what the panel pushed back on, and what they would do differently.

“BFS from one island expanding outward layer by layer felt like the right move, and I got there eventually, but my initial instinct was to just try all pairs of cells from each island and compute distances which is obviously way too slow.” The rest of the author's notes on Software Engineer interview at Coupang, Technical Phone Screen round, covers how they worked through the question, what the panel pushed back on, and what they would do differently.

“This sounds manageable until you realize they're not just listening politely.” The rest of the author's notes on Software Engineer interview at Coupang, Technical Phone Screen round, covers how they worked through the question, what the panel pushed back on, and what they would do differently.

“This felt like one question but it was really five.” The rest of the author's notes on Software Engineer interview at Coupang, Onsite - Behavioral / Leadership round, covers how they worked through the question, what the panel pushed back on, and what they would do differently.

“I went straight to splitting on commas and wrapping the int conversions in a try/except to handle malformed rows, which felt right.” The rest of the author's notes on Software Engineer interview at Coupang, Technical Phone Screen round, covers how they worked through the question, what the panel pushed back on, and what they would do differently.

“My first instinct was just BFS from one island toward the other, which is mostly right, but I fumbled the setup.” The rest of the author's notes on Software Engineer interview at Coupang, Technical Phone Screen round, covers how they worked through the question, what the panel pushed back on, and what they would do differently.

“This is a beast of a question.” The rest of the author's notes on Software Engineer interview at Coupang, Onsite - System Design / Architecture round, covers how they worked through the question, what the panel pushed back on, and what they would do differently.

“The core idea isn't that hard once you see it: BFS/DFS to mark one island, then BFS outward from it counting steps until you hit the second island.” The rest of the author's notes on Software Engineer interview at Coupang, Technical Phone Screen round, covers how they worked through the question, what the panel pushed back on, and what they would do differently.

“This sounds like a standard 'tell me about yourself' project question until they start pulling threads.” The rest of the author's notes on Software Engineer interview at Coupang, Onsite - Behavioral / Leadership round, covers how they worked through the question, what the panel pushed back on, and what they would do differently.

“This was a lot to unpack.” The rest of the author's notes on Software Engineer interview at Coupang, Onsite - System Design / Architecture round, covers how they worked through the question, what the panel pushed back on, and what they would do differently.