Backend-Focused Take-Home | Dataford Interview Questions

Tell me about a take-home task you completed that primarily focused on writing backend code.

Implement a deterministic job scheduler that assigns dependency-constrained jobs to a fixed number of workers. Return each job's start and end times in launch order, or an empty list when the dependency graph contains a cycle.

Input and output

jobs is a list of dictionaries with id, duration, and dependencies; workers is a positive integer. Implement def schedule_jobs(jobs, workers):. Return a list of dictionaries containing id, start, and end.

Constraints

1 <= len(jobs) <= 5000
1 <= workers <= 1000
0 <= job.duration
Job IDs are unique strings
Every dependency refers to a job in jobs
The dependency graph may contain cycles
Each job appears in at most one schedule entry

Function Signature

def schedule_jobs(jobs, workers):

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