eBay phone screen, Top K recs plus scale discussion

chloe.chenAug 13, 2026

went through something similar last month, phone screen felt fine but the java stack questions after threw me off a bit

User-4njs7Aug 13, 2026

what kind of java stack questions did you get? just curious how deep they go

8

User-1t0jiAug 13, 2026

did they go into the caching or tiered storage side of scaling too, or just stop at distributed counters?

rohanvermaAug 13, 2026

mostly just distributed counters and consistency, didn't really get into caching before time ran out tbh

4

User-bervnAug 13, 2026

how long did it take to hear back after the round? trying to gauge if I should follow up yet

User-z4dmzAug 13, 2026

frequency map plus bucket sort is basically what I did too, seems like a solid default for that type of problem

blakeAug 13, 2026

rough, sorry to hear it. their loop always feels longer than it needs to be