Heap / Priority Queuehard70 minFull Stack Developer

Approvals Real-Time Top-K Prioritizer

Full Stack Developer signal: heap + top-k in a approval workflow context. This is a ProdMatch-owned full stack engineer drill, framed as a March 2026 Adobe Workflow Platform simulation, not a copied platform question.

Company context

Adobe · Workflow Platform

Freshness

March 2026

Product surface

approval workflow

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

Question

Your Workflow Platform team needs a live top-k view for approvals. 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

workflow graphs
API pagination
cache invalidation
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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