Questions that have appeared at Jane Street for an Engineering (Case Study) interview.

1. System Design

Question: How would you design a distributed system for handling high-frequency trading data in real time?

Question: If you were tasked with designing a system to handle billions of transactions per day, what would be your primary considerations?

Question: How would you design a fault-tolerant system that can handle the real-time processing of large amounts of financial data?

2. Data Structures and Algorithms

Question: Can you explain a time when you had to choose one data structure over another to solve a problem? What were the factors that influenced your decision?

Question: Describe a scenario where you used a particular algorithm to improve the efficiency of a software solution.

Question: How would you design an algorithm to match buy and sell orders in a trading system?

3. Scalability and Performance

Question: What are some techniques you would use to ensure a system can scale to handle increasing volumes of data and transactions?

Question: Can you discuss a situation where you had to optimize the performance of a software system? What was your approach and what was the outcome?

Question: In a high-frequency trading system, what would be your strategies to minimize latency?

4. Debugging and Problem Solving

Question: Describe a difficult bug you encountered in a past project and explain how you went about resolving it.

Question: Can you discuss a time when you had to troubleshoot a performance issue in a software system? What was your approach?

Question: How do you approach identifying and fixing bottlenecks in a software system?

5. Risk and Failure Analysis

Question: How would you handle a scenario where a critical system fails during peak trading hours?

Question: What strategies would you employ to identify potential risks or failures in a software system before they occur?

Question: Can you describe a situation where a system failure occurred and how you managed it? What were the lessons learned?