SoundCloud interview question

What algorithm(s) and data structures does Lucene use to find the matching documents given a query, inverted index and matching criteria?

Interview Answers

Anonymous

2 Jun 2016

(I failed to answer this question since I hadn't examined the source code of Lucene code and hadn't memorized the details before the interview)

Anonymous

4 Feb 2021

It's essential to demonstrate that you can really go deep... there are plenty of followup questions and (sometimes tangential) angles to explore. There's a lot of Software Engineer experts who've worked at SoundCloud, who provide this sort of practice through mock interviews. There's a whole list of them curated on Prepfully. prepfully.com/practice-interviews