Deduplicate Loan Records | Dataford Interview Questions

Implement a function to deduplicate loan records based on a composite key while preserving the most recent update timestamp.

The input is a list of dictionaries containing loan_id, investor_id, and an ISO 8601 UTC updated_at string. Use (loan_id, investor_id) as the composite key and return one complete record per key, preserving the order in which unique keys first appear.

Function

def deduplicate_loans(records):

Constraints

0 <= len(records) <= 1000
Each record contains loan_id, investor_id, and updated_at
loan_id and investor_id are non-empty strings
updated_at is a valid UTC timestamp in YYYY-MM-DDTHH:MM:SSZ format
If timestamps tie for a key, retain the first record

Function Signature

def deduplicate_loans(records):

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