Heap / Priority Queuemedium45 minMobile Engineer

Retry Real-Time Top-K Prioritizer

Mobile Engineer signal: heap + top-k in a network retry queue context. This is a ProdMatch-owned mobile engineer drill, framed as a April 2026 Microsoft Connectivity simulation, not a copied platform question.

Company context

Microsoft · Connectivity

Freshness

April 2026

Product surface

network retry queue

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

Question

Your Connectivity team needs a live top-k view for requests. 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

offline sync
local cache
gesture streams
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.

Next Similar Problems

Sync Real-Time Top-K Prioritizerhard Feed Real-Time Top-K Prioritizerhard Cache Real-Time Top-K Prioritizerhard