Jerry.Ai Software Engineer Interview Experience — GPS Trivia in the Recruiter Screen, Stuck on "move" in the OA

Recruiter Screen

The interviewer was really friendly.

She started by walking me through the company, then asked if I had any questions for her.

In the middle she threw in an unusual question: how GPS works / the underlying design. Roughly, how GPS works, how the signal propagates, and why errors happen — for example the difference between the satellite's atomic clock and the clock on your phone.

I fumbled through this part a bit since I don't actually know the details of GPS that well. It felt less like a GPS knowledge check and more like testing whether you can reason about and abstract an unfamiliar system.

After that came some standard questions:

• Walk me through your background / self-introduction
• Why do you want to leave your current company
• Projects you've worked on — your role, impact, and specifics
• The size of your current company
• How your manager would describe you, strengths and weaknesses included
• How often you ship a feature
• What the rest of the interview process looks like

OA

The OA was one problem, mainly string manipulation.

Roughly: determine whether one string can be transformed into another with a single operation, and output what that operation was. The operations were:

• add: insert a character
• move: move a character
• replace: replace a character
• delete: delete a character

Examples were something like:

• baren -> bbren, output: replace a b
• banan -> banana, output: add a
• abcde -> acdeb, output: move b

I don't remember the exact input/output format anymore, but the core of it was string processing.

I got stuck on the move case — brain-froze a bit and didn't handle it well.