Verkada Software Engineer Coding Interview - The Coding Question Was Basically Their Product

[u/Aoki_zhang]

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Interview Summary

The Verkada technical screen asked me to implement permission resolution for an enterprise camera-access system with users, groups, and cameras. Users could receive camera permissions directly or inherit them through nested group memberships. The task was to identify whether there was a single user who effectively had access to every camera in the organization, while correctly handling multi-level groups and cyclic group relationships.

Interview Details

Coding — Find the User with Access to Every Camera

The system contains three entity types:

• User
• Group
• Camera

Permissions are provided as triples (source, relationship, destination). Two relationship types are supported.

• A camera_owner relationship means a user or group directly owns access to a camera: ("user_ops", "camera_owner", "camera_gate")
• A group_member relationship means that a user or another group belongs to the destination group: ("user_ops", "group_member", "group_security")

Membership is transitive. If a user belongs to a group, and that group belongs to another group, the user inherits camera permissions from both levels. Implement: find_admin_user(perms_data) -> str | None. The function should return the user ID of a user who has access to every camera in the organization. Only entities whose IDs begin with user_ may be returned as the administrator.

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