Forward Deployed Infrastructure Engineer Interview Experience

Walk me through your background.

What I got from this call was that they liked people who already worked with or for the gov.

Solve a repeated substring LeetCode Medium problem.

I solved the repeated substring problem cleanly, and because I finished a little early she added another condition where I had to translate the produced output back into the input. I treated it like a normal coding screen, talked through my logic, then handled the reverse-translation extension too. I walked out feeling like that one went pretty well.

Based on these Apollo deployment fundamentals, how would you handle a disconnected child that can only receive 20% of the parent's information per child?

I first learned their Apollo setup, like services across environments, release channels deciding eligible versions, and recalls overriding approval when a version is unsafe. For the disconnected child, I proposed sending a child-specific snapshot of needed production versions, artifacts, and metadata, while prioritizing recalls. If releases outpaced transfer limits, I suggested skipping intermediate versions to save space. He agreed with the space-saving logic, then pushed hard on upgrade-path safety and dependency compatibility, since skipping versions can break things, so I had to defend when that shortcut would and would not be safe.

I started by proposing seeding data with hired observers, then layering in diner feedback, restaurant-submitted reports, and opt-in sound readings. I kept the source attached because a restaurant reporting on itself is not independent evidence. I modeled observations by visit time, so Tuesday vs. Friday evening could lead to very different comfort estimates. I also wanted recent comparable third-party reports, visible sample size, and a way to explicitly say when evidence was insufficient. He seemed to like that I focused on conversation comfort, not just averaging decibels.

A reachable town is being reported as unreachable in this road-network codebase. Find and fix the bug.

They gave me multiple Python files, a graph diagram, JSON road records, and tests. The scenario was a mayor analyzing a road network where towns were vertices and roads were bidirectional weighted edges. I traced the issue to the code only storing roads in one direction, so I fixed it by adding the reverse connection for every road.

Now return the travel time of any valid path, not necessarily the shortest one.

I adapted the recursive DFS so that as a successful path unwound, it added each road's travel time. I made the destination return 0, and a failed branch return None, because 0 itself can be a valid successful result. That distinction was the key part of the extension.