Akamai Coding Interview Questions
25 Akamai coding interview problems with full optimal solutions — 8 easy, 12 medium, 5 hard. Every problem ships with multiple approaches (brute-force first, then the optimal), complexity tables for each, company-specific tips on what an Akamai interviewer values, and a FAQ section.
Showing 6 problems of 25
- #4hardoccasionally asked
4. Median of Two Sorted Arrays
Find the median of two sorted arrays in O(log(m+n)) time. Akamai asks this to test binary search mastery at its hardest — computing the p50 latency across two sorted measurement arrays without merging them maps directly to how distributed edge performance dashboards aggregate data from multiple regions.
- #49mediumoccasionally asked
49. Group Anagrams
Group strings that are anagrams of each other. Akamai uses this to probe hash key design — choosing the right canonical form (sorted string vs. character frequency vector) is the same trade-off engineers face when designing cache keys for edge routing rules.
- #70easyoccasionally asked
70. Climbing Stairs
Count the distinct ways to climb n stairs taking 1 or 2 steps at a time. Akamai uses this as an entry point into dynamic programming — the recurrence relation is immediately applicable to retry-strategy combinatorics and caching policy analysis.
- #127hardoccasionally asked
127. Word Ladder
Find the shortest transformation sequence from one word to another changing one letter at a time. Akamai ties this to BFS in routing graphs — finding the minimum number of hops between two network states where each hop changes exactly one configuration parameter is the same shortest-path problem on an implicit graph.
- #139mediumoccasionally asked
139. Word Break
Determine if a string can be segmented into words from a dictionary. Akamai frames this as rule-matching in edge logic — determining whether a URL path can be decomposed into a sequence of known routing tokens is the same dynamic programming problem applied to real-time request handling.
- #704easyoccasionally asked
704. Binary Search
Search a sorted array for a target value in O(log n) time. Akamai uses binary search as a litmus for algorithmic correctness — the off-by-one bug in the loop condition is the same class of error that causes out-of-bound reads in high-performance C++ networking code.