dark alpha capital·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen
Jun 2026
Interviewed for a software engineer role at Dark Alpha Capital and got hit with an assignment optimization problem. Pretty algorithmic heavy, felt like a competitive programming round more than a typical SWE screen.
- You have n analysts and m field devices placed on a 2D grid. Each analyst must be assigned exactly one distinct device, and the cost of each assignment is the Manhattan distance between them. Find the minimum total assignment cost. Constraints: n up to 10, m up to 15.
“My first instinct was greedy and it was wrong.”