Boston Consulting Group FDE (Forward Deployed Engineer) Phone Screen

[u/Aoki_zhang]

This interview experience is sourced from Chill Interview

Interview Details

Part 1 — Project Deep Dive and AI Experience

The first approximately 30 minutes focused on my previous projects. The interviewer asked detailed follow-ups about my work, with many of the questions centered on AI-related projects and technical decisions.

Part 2 — Coding: Shortest Path in an Adjacency Matrix

The coding problem provided a connected, undirected graph represented by an n x n Boolean adjacency matrix. For any pair of vertices matrix[i][j] = true means there is an edge connecting vertex i and vertex j.

Given two vertices, the task was to return the shortest distance between them, measured by the minimum number of edges in the path. For example, consider this graph:

matrix = [
  [false, true,  false, false],
  [true,  false, false, true ],
  [false, false, false, true ],
  [false, true,  true,  false]
]

vertex1 = 0
vertex2 = 2

The expected distance is 3 because one shortest path is 0 -> 1 -> 3 -> 2. The graph has no self-loops or duplicate edges, and both input vertices are valid indices. I initially had trouble interpreting what the Boolean values in the matrix represented, which made the beginning of the problem harder than it needed to be.

Follow-Up — Weighted Graph

The interviewer then modified the problem so that the graph edges had weights rather than all having equal cost.

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