Heap / Priority Queuehard70 minSoftware Engineer

Editor Real-Time Top-K Prioritizer

Name: ProdMatch.ai
Availability: InStock

Software Engineer signal: heap + top-k in a collaborative editor context. This is a ProdMatch-owned software engineer drill, framed as a April 2026 Dream11 Creation Tools simulation, not a copied platform question.

Company context

Dream11 · Creation Tools

Freshness

April 2026

Product surface

collaborative editor

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

Question

Your Creation Tools team needs a live top-k view for operations. 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

invariants
API correctness
graph modelling
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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