eBay Software Engineer interview experience

I was given a dictionary and a pattern that included wildcards: a question mark to match a single character and a dot to match one or more characters. I had to identify all matching words based on those rules.

Once I solved the core problem, we shifted into how to scale the approach. That scaling discussion made it feel less like a “just finish the algorithm” check and more like they wanted to see whether I could think about performance and how the solution would behave with larger inputs.