Glean interview questions

Showing 1–30 of 41 results

• AI-Paired Rate-Limited Wikipedia Crawler That Prioritizes Unseen Title InitialsMedium

  Pair with an AI coding assistant to build a rate-limited Wikipedia crawler that first crawls pages whose title initial has not yet been covered, then crawls randomly once all 26 letters are done. Tests frontier design, link normalization, rate limiting and disciplined use of AI-generated code.

  GleanMachine Learning EngineerSoftware Engineering FundamentalsOnsite
• Build a React Social Feed with Upvote/Downvote Re-Sorting and Pinned PostsMedium

  Build a React social feed where upvotes and downvotes re-sort posts by score in descending order and pinned posts stay at the top. Tests state design and immutable updates, correct vote-toggle arithmetic, deterministic ordering, accessibility and optimistic persistence with rollback.

  GleanFrontend EngineerSoftware Engineering FundamentalsOnsite
• Compute DAU and rolling MAU with zero daysEasy

  This question evaluates a data scientist's proficiency in time-series analytics and data aggregation, focusing on computing daily active users and a 30-day rolling MAU from user and login tables, and falls under the Data Manipulation (SQL/Python) domain.

  GleanData ScientistData Manipulation (SQL/Python)Technical Screen
• Decide If a Passenger Can Reach a Station Using Time-Indexed Train Routes and TransfersMedium

  Given trains described as time-indexed lists of stations, decide whether a passenger starting at one station at time zero can reach another by riding, waiting and transferring. Tests modeling station and time as search states, handling waits and same-time transfers, and breadth-first search over a time-expanded graph.

  GleanMachine Learning EngineerCoding & AlgorithmsOnsite
• Delete the Fewest Parentheses to Balance a String of Only Open and Close BracketsMedium

  Given a string of only open and close parentheses, delete the fewest characters so the rest is balanced and return the resulting string, using standard left-to-right matching to define a unique answer. Tests bracket matching, linear-time scanning and careful handling of leftover unmatched characters.

  GleanSoftware EngineerCoding & AlgorithmsOnsite
• Design Employee-to-Employee DistanceMedium

  This question evaluates competencies in ML system design, similarity and representation modeling, feature and data engineering, scalable low-latency serving architectures, and privacy, fairness, and evaluation practices.

  GleanMachine Learning EngineerML System DesignOnsite
• Design Real-Time Typeahead for Enterprise Search: History, People, Docs, Apps, FiltersMedium

  Design real-time typeahead for an enterprise search product that suggests past searches, people, documents, apps and filters as the user types. Tests client request policy and stale-response handling, accessible combobox UI, permission-aware backend fan-out, blending across sources and latency budgets.

  GleanFrontend EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Design a Test Strategy for a System That Counts the Leaves on a Large TreeMedium

  An open-ended testing scenario: design a test strategy for a system that counts the leaves on a large tree. Tests clarifying an ambiguous system, finding a test oracle, functional and boundary cases, scale and robustness testing, and setting release criteria for counts that may be estimates.

  GleanSoftware EngineerSoftware Engineering FundamentalsOnsite
• Design a Work-Together Distance Between Any Two Employees of a CompanyMedium

  Design a learned distance between any two employees of a company that reflects how much they actually work together. Tests ML framing without ground-truth labels, collaboration signals and their normalization, link-prediction training, evaluation, privacy and serving at company scale.

  GleanMachine Learning EngineerML System DesignOnsite
• Determine Reachability in Train ScheduleMedium

  Solve train-schedule reachability with waiting and transfers using time-respecting graph search. The answer models earliest station arrival, preprocesses station visits, handles forward-only train routes, and explains transfer edge cases and complexity.

  GleanMachine Learning EngineerCoding & AlgorithmsTechnical Screen
• Expectation and Variance of a Sum of Two Random Variables, Including CovarianceMedium

  Asks how to compute the expectation and variance of the sum of two random variables, in general and when they are independent. Tests derivation from definitions, the role of covariance, generalizing to weighted sums and differences, and applying the result to data-science problems such as comparing group means.

  GleanData ScientistStatistics & MathOnsite
• Find Earliest Train RouteMedium

  This question evaluates a candidate's ability to model and search time-dependent transit networks, combining temporal graph reasoning, state-space search, and path reconstruction for itinerary reporting.

  GleanMachine Learning EngineerCoding & AlgorithmsOnsite
• Find Which Words From a List Can Be Traced Through Adjacent Cells of a Letter GridMedium

  Given a letter grid and a list of words, return every word that can be spelled by a path of edge-adjacent cells without reusing a cell, sorted lexicographically. Covers the single-word search and its many-words follow-up, and tests backtracking and pruning on a large word list.

  GleanSoftware EngineerCoding & AlgorithmsOnsite
• Find the Kth Largest in Two Sorted ArraysMedium

  This question evaluates proficiency with array manipulation and selection algorithms, specifically understanding order statistics and working with two sorted sequences.

  GleanSoftware EngineerCoding & AlgorithmsTechnical Screen
• Find the k-th Largest Value Across Two Sorted Arrays Without Fully Merging ThemMedium

  Given two arrays sorted in non-decreasing order and an integer k, return the k-th largest value among all their elements, counting duplicates separately. Tests reasoning about ranks across two sorted sequences, careful handling of empty arrays and duplicates, and moving past a linear scan toward logarithmic time.

  GleanSoftware EngineerCoding & AlgorithmsOnsite
• Group Words into Transitive Synonym Sets by Shared Two-Words-Before-and-After ContextMedium

  Given a list of sentences, treat two words as synonyms when they share the same two words before and two words after, close the relation transitively, and return every synonym group in a canonical sorted order. Tests context hashing, union-find or connected components, and exact output formatting.

  GleanSoftware EngineerCoding & AlgorithmsOnsite
• How Would You Test a System That Counts the Leaves on a Tree?Medium

  This problem evaluates your ability to design a comprehensive testing strategy for an ambiguous, real-world system where an exact 'ground truth' is difficult to obtain.

  GleanSoftware EngineerSoftware Engineering FundamentalsTechnical Screen
• How a Tester Prioritizes and Organizes Work Under Project Deadline PressureMedium

  A behavioral question for a QA engineer: how you handle and organize testing work when a project deadline creates pressure. Tests risk-based prioritization, use of automation and collaboration, transparent communication of remaining risk, and a structured STAR answer with measurable results.

  GleanSoftware EngineerBehavioral & LeadershipOnsite
• How to measure product success?Easy

  This question evaluates a data scientist's competency in product analytics, metric definition, experiment design, and causal inference, including articulation of a north-star metric, supporting funnel and guardrail metrics, and handling confounding, seasonality, and heterogeneous effects.

  GleanData ScientistAnalytics & ExperimentationOnsite
• Implement 2048 Board Tilts in Four Directions with Merging and Game-Over DetectionMedium

  Implement the move logic of the 2048 sliding-tile game on a 4x4 board: slide and merge tiles for left, right, up and down swipes so each tile merges at most once, then decide when no swipe can change the board. Tests edge-case precision, code reuse across directions and a correct game-over rule.

  GleanSoftware EngineerSoftware Engineering FundamentalsOnsite
• Implement 2048 Game LogicMedium

  This question evaluates array and matrix manipulation, stateful simulation of game mechanics, and handling edge cases such as merge constraints, single-merge-per-move rules, and empty-cell management.

  GleanSoftware EngineerCoding & AlgorithmsTechnical Screen
• Implement 2048 tilt moveHard

  This question evaluates a candidate's ability to implement array and matrix manipulation, deterministic state-transition logic, and rule-based merging behavior in a grid-based simulation.

  GleanSoftware EngineerCoding & AlgorithmsTechnical Screen
• Implement 2048-Style Tile Slides and Merges for All Four Board DirectionsMedium

  A software engineer phone-screen coding exercise: implement the slide-and-merge move of a 2048-style tile board, first to the left with working tests, then for all four directions. It tests careful array manipulation, the single-merge rule, and the trade-off between rotating the board and remapping row and column indices.

  GleanSoftware EngineerSoftware Engineering FundamentalsTechnical Screen
• Implement Rate-Limited Wikipedia CrawlerMedium

  This question evaluates a candidate's ability to implement a rate-limited web crawler, testing skills in crawl frontier management, prioritization by page-title initial, deduplication, rate limiting, and robust error handling.

  GleanMachine Learning EngineerCoding & AlgorithmsOnsite
• Implement Two-Player Connect Four on a 6x7 Board with Win and Draw DetectionMedium

  Implement two-player Connect Four on a 6x7 board: drop discs into columns, detect four in a row in every direction, handle full columns and draws, and render a playable interface. Tests clean separation of game logic from UI, efficient win checks from the last move and careful edge handling.

  GleanFrontend EngineerSoftware Engineering FundamentalsOnsite
• Implement a Byte Pair Encoding (BPE) TokenizerMedium

  Implement a Byte Pair Encoding (BPE) tokenizer with training, encoding, and decoding capabilities using frequency-based iterative merging.

  GleanSoftware EngineerCoding & AlgorithmsTechnical Screen
• Implement a Byte-Pair Encoding Tokenizer: Threshold Training, Encode and DecodeMedium

  Implement a byte-pair encoding tokenizer with train, encode and decode, where training repeatedly merges the most frequent adjacent token pair whose count reaches a threshold, breaking ties lexicographically. Tests precise reading of the merge rules, round-trip correctness and the complexity of training on long text.

  GleanSoftware EngineerSoftware Engineering FundamentalsOnsite
• Prioritizing QA Work Under Deadline PressureMedium

  This behavioral question assesses your ability to apply risk-based prioritization, manage quality trade-offs, and communicate transparently with stakeholders when engineering deadlines constrain testing capacity.

  GleanSoftware EngineerBehavioral & LeadershipTechnical Screen
• Product Case: Define Success Metrics for a Product, Using Enterprise Search as ExampleMedium

  A data scientist product case: define how to measure the success of a product, practiced on an enterprise search tool. Tests building a metric hierarchy with a north star, input metrics and guardrails, separating users from paying customers, defining a successful search and attributing changes causally.

  GleanData ScientistAnalytics & ExperimentationOnsite
• Rank Every Cell of a Distinct-Value Matrix Consistently Within Its Row and ColumnMedium

  Replace every value in a matrix of distinct integers with the smallest rank such that larger values outrank smaller ones within each row and column. Tests processing values in sorted order, tracking per-row and per-column state, and the one-dimensional special case.

  GleanSoftware EngineerCoding & AlgorithmsOnsite