← Back to Directory

enigma

Small

Enigma is a data and analytics company that provides business identity and intelligence data on small and medium-sized businesses. It is known for helping financial institutions and other organizations verify, underwrite, and understand businesses through its data platform.

4 interview notes · updated Jul 2026

enigma·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jul 2026
Interviewed for a software engineering role at Enigma and got a search/filtering problem that looked straightforward until you had to think about preprocessing trade-offs. Pretty algorithmic for a company I didn't expect to go deep on CS fundamentals.
  • Given a list of book titles and a query string, return all titles where at least one word matches the query by exact match (case-insensitive), prefix match, or anagram match. Then discuss trade-offs between preprocessing the data upfront versus computing matches at query time.

“The matching logic itself wasn't too bad.”

View Post

enigma·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jul 2026
Interviewed at Enigma for a software engineer role and got a system design question about extending a book search system to support autocomplete. Pretty focused technical round, not a lot of small talk.
  • You have an existing book title search system backed by an inverted index. Extend it to support autocomplete: given a partial word as input, return all titles where at least one word starts with that prefix.

“I jumped straight to a trie and felt pretty good about it.”

View Post

enigma·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jun 2026
Interviewed at Enigma for a software engineer role and got a search system design question that was more layered than it first looked. The problem built up from basic keyword lookup to autocomplete to anagram matching, and the design choices had to compose cleanly across all three layers.
  • You have a book title search system that supports exact keyword and prefix (autocomplete) lookups. Extend it to handle simple typos by returning all titles that contain a word which is an anagram of the query term.

“The anagram part wasn't too bad once I remembered the sorted-character-signature trick.”

View Post

enigma·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Apr 2026
Interviewed for a software engineering role at Enigma and got a question about keyword search across book titles. Pretty focused on data structures and how you'd actually build something efficient rather than just brute-forcing it.
  • Given a list of book titles and a search keyword, return all titles that contain that keyword as a complete word. The match should be case-insensitive and should ignore punctuation.

“My first instinct was to just loop through every title and do a string search, which works but they clearly wanted something smarter.”

View Post