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Identify and handle race conditions

DatabricksSoftware Engineer · Technical Screen
HardSoftware EngineerTechnical ScreenSystem Design

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This question evaluates understanding of concurrency, race conditions, synchronization mechanisms, and performance trade-offs in designing thread-safe in-memory data structures like key-value stores and hit counters.

Identify the race conditions that could occur in your key-value store and hit counter under concurrent access. Propose thread-safety mechanisms (e.g., coarse- vs fine-grained locks, read/write locks, atomic operations, lock-free designs) and discuss their correctness and performance trade-offs. Outline how you would test and validate concurrency behavior.