Heap / Priority Queuehard70 minDevOps / SRE Engineer

Incident Real-Time Top-K Prioritizer

DevOps / SRE Engineer signal: heap + top-k in a incident correlation context. This is a ProdMatch-owned devops sre drill, framed as a March 2026 PayPal Reliability simulation, not a copied platform question.

Company context

PayPal · Reliability

Freshness

March 2026

Product surface

incident correlation

ProdMatch interview simulation based on product-team patterns; not a claim of a real company question.

Question

Your Reliability team needs a live top-k view for alerts. Each update changes an item's score. Return the current top k item IDs after each update, ordered by score desc then ID asc.

Input

Initial scores, k, and update stream [id, delta].

Output

Top-k IDs after every update.

Constraints

1 <= items <= 200000
1 <= updates <= 200000
Scores can be negative.

Concepts

blast-radius graphs
alert dedupe
rolling windows
heap
top-k
streaming rank

scores: [5,1,3], k=2, update [1,+5] -> [1,0]

Approach

Try framing your own approach first. The 30 seconds you think before peeking is where learning happens.

Clean Solution

Reveal the approach first.

How well did you understand?

Your rating tunes when this problem shows up again.

Common Mistakes

Use a stable tie-breaker for equal scores.
Do not sort the full stream when k is small.

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