Stripe Internship Indexed Proximity Search Screen

Role: Software Engineering Intern
Result: Not disclosed
Timing: The exact interview day was not shared. January 2024 follows the report month.

The task searched a document for a multiword query. The candidate had to return positions of the first query word when the other query words appeared close enough.

They were then asked to preprocess the text so later queries could run faster. The discussion covered inverted indexes, two pointers, and binary search.

The wording left one important ambiguity: whether the distance bound applied from the first word to every later word or between each neighboring pair. Tokenization rules were also missing.

Practice: Indexed Proximity Search.