Binary Searchmedium45 minDevOps / SRE Engineer

SLO Minimum Feasible Throughput

DevOps / SRE Engineer signal: binary search on answer + monotonic predicate in a SLO burn-rate monitor context. This is a ProdMatch-owned devops sre drill, framed as a May 2026 PayPal Reliability Platform simulation, not a copied platform question.

Company context

PayPal · Reliability Platform

Freshness

May 2026

Product surface

SLO burn-rate monitor

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

Question

For SLO burn-rate monitor, choose the minimum processing rate so all windows finish before deadline. Each worker can process rate units per minute, rounded up per item.

Input

Work item sizes and deadline minutes.

Output

Minimum integer rate.

Constraints

1 <= items.length <= 200000
1 <= item size <= 1e9
Deadline is at least items.length.

Concepts

blast-radius graphs
alert dedupe
rolling windows
binary search on answer
monotonic predicate

sizes [3,6,7,11], deadline=8 -> 4

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?

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Common Mistakes

Use low + (high - low) // 2 to avoid overflow.
The predicate must be monotonic or binary search is invalid.

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