Find shortest paths and detect cycles in a graph stored as edges, using a recursive CTE.
An org-chart recursion walks a tree, but a general graph has multiple paths and back-edges. The signal is building up the visited path to prune cycles and ranking paths by cost to land the shortest one.
Updated Sep 2026 · Grounded in real GenAI, LLM, and AI/ML engineering interview loops and written to a senior-engineer editorial bar.
An org-chart recursion walks a tree, but a general graph has multiple paths and back-edges. The signal is building up the visited path to prune cycles and ranking paths by cost to land the shortest one.
Lead with where the obvious approach breaks, because that is the judgment they are screening for — most candidates jump straight to the happy path and lose the room.
Then walk the failure back through the pipeline in order, naming the one metric the customer's exec sponsor actually cares about before you propose the fix.
