DSA by domain
Systems & Infrastructure
Reliability, routing and low-level tooling — graphs, heaps, tries and greedy scheduling underneath it all.
What the roles here have in common
No single topic is core for all 7 roles in Systems & Infrastructure, the widest spread of any domain on this site. That is the finding, not a gap: “systems” covers jobs whose interviews genuinely share no common foundation, so picking the specific role first matters more here than anywhere else.
20 more topics are core for some of these roles but not all of them. Which ones apply is exactly what changes when you pick your role below:
Roles in this domain
Same 370 problems, re-sequenced per role. Pick the exact one you are interviewing for. Every role opens its own roadmap, and the roles with a full guide open the guide.
- Site Reliability EngineerDependency graphs, alert heaps, outage intervals, and rate-limit windows mirror real incident work; backtracking and DP effectively never come up.119 of 370 problems sit in its core topics, starting with Graph, Heap, Intervals.
- Cloud EngineerCIDR bitmask arithmetic, resource dependency DAGs, longest-prefix routing tries, and bin-packing greedy questions; latency-window problems are the SRE side, not this one.144 of 370 problems sit in its core topics, starting with Graph, Intervals, Bit Manipulation.
- Performance EngineerCache-friendly array layout, sorting, top-k heaps, and rolling-window latency math matter more than any tree or backtracking topic.95 of 370 problems sit in its core topics, starting with Arrays, Sorting, Binary Search.
- Embedded / Firmware EngineerRegister bit-twiddling, fixed buffers, ring queues, and intrusive linked lists are the bar; recursion is penalized on constrained stacks, not rewarded.99 of 370 problems sit in its core topics, starting with Bit Manipulation, Arrays, Linked List.
- Storage EngineerBitmap allocators, extent intervals, LSM merge heaps, and free-list pointer work: the layout and durability layer beneath the query planner a DB engineer owns.103 of 370 problems sit in its core topics, starting with Bit Manipulation, Intervals, Heap.
- Compiler / PL EngineerParsing builds and walks trees (ASTs), optimization is graph and dataflow analysis, and evaluation leans on stacks and recursion; register allocation is literally graph colouring.154 of 370 problems sit in its core topics, starting with Binary Trees, Recursion, Stack.
- Networking EngineerRouting is graph shortest-path, IP lookup is longest-prefix tries, and packet scheduling is heaps, queues, and greedy interval work; trees and DP barely appear.76 of 370 problems sit in its core topics, starting with Graph, Trie, Greedy.