Kivi Capital

I recently interviewed with Kivi Capital for the Quant Researcher role. The first round lasted around 60 minutes and consisted of one algorithmic problem followed by several conceptual computer science questions. --- ## Question 1 – Shipment Delivery Optimization You need to deliver N shipments. For each shipment, you may hire either Vendor X or Vendor Y. * Vendor X delivery times: X = [x₁, x₂, …, xₙ] * Vendor Y delivery times: Y = [y₁, y₂, …, yₙ] Constraints: * Vendor X processes shipments sequentially → total time = sum of delivery times assigned to X * Vendor Y processes shipments in parallel → total time = maximum delivery time among shipments assigned to Y Goal: Minimize the total completion time for delivering all shipments. Let: * Shipments assigned to X → indices (i₁, i₂, …) * Shipments assigned to Y → indices (j₁, j₂, …) Then: * Time taken by X = sum(x[i₁], x[i₂], …) = t₁ * Time taken by Y = max(y[j₁], y[j₂], …) = t₂ Total completion time: max(t₁, t₂) --- ### Approach 1. If xᵢ > yᵢ, assigning that shipment to Vendor Y is always beneficial since Y completes it faster. 2. For cases where xᵢ < yᵢ, the choice is non-trivial because: * Assigning to X increases the sequential sum * Assigning to Y increases the maximum parallel time 3. For such shipments, create pairs (yᵢ, xᵢ) and sort them by yᵢ. 4. Consider partition points in this sorted list: * Shipments up to index k are assigned to Vendor Y * Remaining shipments are assigned to Vendor X 5. Compute: * Vendor Y time = yₖ * Vendor X time = suffix sum of x-values after k 6. Track the minimum value of: max(yₖ, suffix_sum_x) Time complexity: O(N log N) due to sorting. --- ## Conceptual / CS Questions Asked After the algorithmic question, the interviewer asked several conceptual questions: * Difference between Multithreading and Multiprocessing * What is a Semaphore? * What is a Mutex Lock? * Difference between Semaphore and Mutex * Why do we need Multithreading if we have Async/Await? (use cases) * Difference between Virtual Memory and Physical Memory * What is a Page Table?