Harvey interview questions

Showing 1–30 of 46 results

• Build a Virtualized React Spreadsheet with Cell FormulasMedium

  Design and implement a virtualized React spreadsheet component supporting editable cells, formula evaluation with string concatenation, cycle detection, and targeted re-rendering.

  HarveyFrontend EngineerSoftware Engineering FundamentalsTechnical Screen
• Build an In-Memory File Vault with Duplicate-Name HandlingHard

  Design an in-memory hierarchical file vault supporting automatic directory creation, lexicographical directory listings, and duplicate-name resolution using the smallest available numeric suffix.

  HarveySoftware EngineerCoding & AlgorithmsOnsite
• Defend a Project Decision and Its Trade-offsMedium

  Prepare a project decision deep dive with concrete alternatives, personal ownership, correctness evidence, accepted costs, and a migration rationale.

  HarveySoftware EngineerBehavioral & LeadershipOnsite
• Describe Leading a Technical ProjectMedium

  This question evaluates leadership, ownership, collaboration, technical judgment, and project management skills within the Behavioral & Leadership domain of software engineering.

  HarveySoftware EngineerBehavioral & LeadershipTechnical Screen
• Design Cloud File StorageMedium

  This question tests your ability to design a scalable cloud file storage and collaboration platform, focusing on the architectural separation between metadata and blob storage, chunking, deduplication, and granular access control.

  HarveySoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Design File Storage with Metadata, Access Control, and Chunked UploadsMedium

  Design drive-style file storage with metadata and blob separation, ACL checks, resumable chunk uploads, atomic publication, and version conflicts.

  HarveySoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Design Retrieval-Augmented Answers from a Document VaultHard

  Design an enterprise-grade retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) service for confidential document vaults. The question tests multi-tenant access control, precise citation provenance, document versioning/freshness, retrieval quality, and hallucination/injection defenses.

  HarveySoftware EngineerML System DesignOnsite
• Design Spreadsheet Formula CellsMedium

  This question evaluates ability to design and implement data structures and algorithms for expression parsing, dependency tracking, incremental evaluation, and cycle detection in an in-memory spreadsheet.

  HarveySoftware EngineerCoding & AlgorithmsOnsite
• Design a Chat Application with Durable Conversation HistoryMedium

  Design persistent real-time chat with conversation ordering, idempotent sends, paginated history, optimistic state, delivery receipts, and reconnect catch-up.

  HarveyFrontend EngineerSystem DesignOther
• Design a Cloud File Storage ServiceMedium

  This question evaluates competency in designing large-scale distributed file storage and collaboration systems, covering storage and metadata modeling, API design, synchronization and consistency models, resumable large-file handling, versioning, access control, scalability, availability, durability, and security.

  HarveySoftware EngineerSystem DesignTechnical Screen
• Design a Memo Q&A Agent for a Large Law FirmMedium

  This problem evaluates your ability to design a RAG-based Q&A system for sensitive legal documents, focusing on multi-stage retrieval, hallucination prevention, and data privacy.

  HarveySoftware EngineerML System DesignOnsite
• Design a RAG Q&A Agent over Law Firm Legal MemosHard

  Design an end-to-end Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) system for querying confidential, complex legal memos. This evaluates domain-specific parsing, hybrid retrieval with fine-grained access control, and grounded generation with strict citation fidelity.

  HarveySoftware EngineerML System DesignOnsite
• Design a RAG question-answering systemMedium

  Design an enterprise-grade Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) system capable of answering complex natural language queries over millions of internal documents with high precision, low latency, and verifiable citations.

  HarveySoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Design a Rule-Guided Document Evaluation AgentMedium

  Design an enterprise-grade document evaluation agent that evaluates legal and policy compliance against structured playbooks, producing traceable citations, revision proposals, and tier ratings.

  HarveyAI AgentML System DesignOnsite
• Design a Secure PDF Data RoomMedium

  Design an enterprise-grade virtual data room (VDR) for secure legal document sharing, focusing on multi-tenant access control, instant permission revocation, dynamic watermarking, and tamper-evident audit logging.

  HarveySoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Design a constrained in-memory file systemMedium

  This question evaluates design and implementation skills for hierarchical in-memory data structures, string parsing and file-name collision handling under constraints, and the ability to reason about time and space complexity.

  HarveySoftware EngineerCoding & AlgorithmsTechnical Screen
• Design a production file storage serviceHard

  This question evaluates a candidate's competency in distributed systems and storage architecture, covering metadata schema design, concurrency control for atomic per-directory limits and renaming, transaction boundaries and idempotency, storage models for file bytes, large-file handling, consistency and failure modes, scalability and partitioning, observability, lifecycle management, and security. It is in the System Design domain and is commonly asked because it reveals how a candidate reasons about architectural trade-offs and practical implementation concerns; it tests both high-level conceptual design and hands-on practical application.

  HarveySoftware EngineerSystem DesignTechnical Screen
• Design a secure document vaultMedium

  This question evaluates a candidate's competencies in secure backend system design, covering authentication and authorization, metadata and object storage architectures, integrity verification for chunked uploads, scalability, and operational reliability.

  HarveyBackend EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Design an In-Memory Spreadsheet EngineHard

  Design an in-memory spreadsheet engine that supports cell updates, formula evaluations, cycle detection, and O(1) value lookups via proactive cache propagation.

  HarveySoftware EngineerCoding & AlgorithmsTechnical Screen
• Design an LLM Agent System That Revises a Contract to Comply with Dozens of RulesMedium

  Design an LLM agent system that revises a given contract so it complies with several dozen given legal rules. It tests decomposing work across model calls, representing edits so they can be traced and merged, resolving overlapping or conflicting changes, per-rule verification, and cost and latency trade-offs.

  HarveySoftware EngineerML System DesignOnsite
• Design an in-memory file system with limitsMedium

  This question evaluates the ability to design and implement hierarchical in-memory data structures, manage capacity constraints and OS-style duplicate naming, and reason about edge cases and time/space complexity.

  HarveySoftware EngineerCoding & AlgorithmsTechnical Screen
• Design and Evaluate a Retrieval-Augmented Generation PipelineMedium

  Design a RAG pipeline with document chunking, retrieval recall evaluation, grounded answers, permission-aware context, and versioned index updates.

  HarveySoftware EngineerML System DesignOnsite
• Determine identical files ignoring metadataHard

  A Harvey AI system design screen on determining whether two files are byte-identical while ignoring metadata, then scaling to deduplication. It covers hashing algorithm choice (SHA-256/BLAKE3 vs MD5/xxHash), multi-stage verification, collision and false-positive mitigation, streaming and parallel hashing, content-defined chunking, and persistent hash-index/service design.

  HarveySoftware EngineerSystem DesignTechnical Screen
• Eager Spreadsheet Formulas with Constant-Time ReadsMedium

  Implement eager spreadsheet formulas with constant-time cached reads, transitive dependency updates, cycle rejection, and atomic definition replacement.

  HarveySoftware EngineerCoding & AlgorithmsTechnical Screen
• Embedding Retrieval with Cosine Similarity in a Notebook, and Choosing the MetricMedium

  Implement embedding-based document retrieval with cosine similarity in a Python notebook, then explain how cosine similarity relates to dot product and Euclidean distance and how to measure retrieval quality. It tests vectorized top-k search, deterministic ties, index metric choice and evaluation metrics.

  HarveySoftware EngineerMachine LearningOnsite
• Evaluate Symbol ExpressionsMedium

  Implement an expression evaluator for a dictionary of symbolic definitions with arithmetic operations, resolving dependencies, and detecting cycles and undefined references.

  HarveySoftware EngineerCoding & AlgorithmsOnsite
• Explain project decisions and trade-offsMedium

  This question evaluates proficiency in technical decision-making, trade-off analysis, and system design ownership for backend projects, including architecture rationale, technology selection, and the candidate's specific role and measurable impact.

  HarveyBackend EngineerSoftware Engineering FundamentalsOnsite
• Find Duplicate Files Safely at ScaleMedium

  Design and implement a robust file duplicate finder that handles filesystem cycles, minimizes disk I/O using multi-stage filtering, and avoids loading entire large files into memory.

  HarveySoftware EngineerSoftware Engineering FundamentalsTechnical Screen
• Handle multi-source string matching and taggingMedium

  This question evaluates skills in string matching, pattern recognition, overlap handling, text annotation, and counting occurrences across multiple source strings.

  HarveySoftware EngineerCoding & AlgorithmsTechnical Screen
• Highlight Overlapping Phrases in a SentenceHard

  Tests string search algorithms, interval merging techniques, and clean API design for formatting highlighted spans in text without redundant or malformed tags.

  HarveySoftware EngineerSoftware Engineering FundamentalsTechnical Screen