reevo·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen
May 2026
Interviewed for a software engineering role at Reevo and got hit with a data structures question that was more layered than it looked on the surface. The problem started simple but kept growing as they added constraints around memory, query volume, and normalization edge cases.
- You have a large dictionary of up to a million unique words and a list of up to 100,000 query strings. For each query, determine whether the word exists in the dictionary. How do you design this system, what data structure do you use, and how do you handle case sensitivity, Unicode normalization, and duplicate queries?
“My first instinct was hash set, which is correct, but I said it too fast and then fumbled when they asked me to justify the memory tradeoff versus a trie.” The rest of the author's notes on Software Engineer interview at reevo, Technical Phone Screen round, covers how they worked through the question, what the panel pushed back on, and what they would do differently.
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