Alibaba interview questions

Showing 1–3 of 3 results

• Explain What Your Team Owns and Why It Needs Its HeadcountMedium

  A resume deep-dive question asking a software engineer to explain what their team owns, why it needs its current number of engineers, and one concrete example that shows the work is harder than it looks. It tests system-level understanding, judgment about complexity and composure when the interviewer says the business sounds simple.

  AlibabaSoftware EngineerBehavioral & LeadershipTechnical Screen
• Fixed-Capacity Cache That Evicts the Least Frequently Used Key, Ties by RecencyMedium

  Build a fixed-capacity key-value cache that evicts the key with the fewest uses, breaking ties by least recent use, and replay a sequence of get and put operations to return each read result. It tests careful per-key frequency and recency tracking with constant average time per operation.

  AlibabaSoftware EngineerCoding & AlgorithmsTechnical Screen
• Idempotent Kafka Consumer: Duplicate Writes, Offset Commits and a Second DatabaseMedium

  A backend design discussion on making a concurrent Kafka consumer idempotent: how to stop duplicate effects when the same message is processed twice, whether a duplicate write should throw or return the existing data, how offsets keep advancing, and how to keep a second database consistent when publishing fails.

  AlibabaSoftware EngineerSystem DesignTechnical Screen