Here are the topics you need to cover if you want to ace big tech interviews:
Basics: Input/Output, File Handling, Loops, Conditionals, Functions, Recursion, Math Operations, Time and Space Complexity
Arrays: Traversal, Insertion, Deletion, Sorting, Searching, Prefix Sum, Sliding Window, Two Pointers
Strings: String Manipulation, Concatenation, Palindrome, Anagram
Linked List: Singly Linked List, Doubly Linked List, Circular Linked List, Traversal, Insertion, Deletion, Reversal
Stacks: Push/Pop, Expression Evaluation, Balanced Parentheses, Monotonic Stack
Queues: Enqueue/Dequeue, Circular Queue, Priority Queue, Deque
Hashing: Hash Map, Hash Set, Frequency Count
Trees: Binary Tree, Binary Search Tree, Tree Traversals (Inorder, Preorder, Postorder, Level Order), N-ary Tree
Heaps: Min-Heap, Max-Heap, Insertion, Deletion, Heapify, K Largest/Smallest Elements
Graphs: Graph representation, BFS, DFS, Cycle Detection, Dijkstra, Union-Find
Advanced topics like the KMP algorithm, Rabin-Karp algorithm, backtracking, dynamic programming (DP), greedy algorithms, divide and conquer, trie, segment tree, Fenwick tree, Bellman-Ford algorithm, Floyd-Warshall algorithm, Kruskal’s algorithm, Prim’s algorithm, and bitmask are rarely asked in SRE interviews.
During interviews, most companies will let you use any programming language. However, Python is recommended for its convenience and because it is widely used in real-world SRE work.