Group Anagrams: the canonical-key hash-map pattern.
Group Anagrams probes the 'compute a canonical key and bucket by it' pattern. Interviewers look for choosing a key that anagrams share without comparing every pair. The answer follows.
Updated Sep 2026 · Grounded in real GenAI, LLM, and AI/ML engineering interview loops and written to a senior-engineer editorial bar.
Group Anagrams probes the 'compute a canonical key and bucket by it' pattern. Interviewers look for choosing a key that anagrams share without comparing every pair. The answer follows.
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.
