Burst Balloons
A hard-tier problem at 61% community acceptance, tagged with Array, Dynamic Programming. Reported in interviews at QBurst and 6 others.
Burst Balloons is a hard dynamic programming problem that shows up in real OAs at Google, Goldman Sachs, Snap, and others. The acceptance rate sits around 61%, which sounds okay until you're in the actual assessment and realize the greedy approach fails. The trick isn't to burst balloons in order. It's to think backwards, reframe the problem space, and build a DP table that tracks intervals instead of sequences. If this problem hits your live OA and you blank on the reversal pattern, StealthCoder solves it in seconds, invisible to the proctor.
Companies that ask "Burst Balloons"
Burst Balloons is the kind of problem that decides whether you pass. StealthCoder reads the problem on screen and surfaces a working solution in under 2 seconds. Invisible to screen share. The proctor sees nothing. Built by an Amazon engineer who realized the OA tests how well you memorized 200 problems, not how well you code.
Get StealthCoderThe problem gives you an array of balloon values and multiplies your score by adjacent balloon values when you burst one. The trap is trying to decide which balloon to burst first. That path leads nowhere. The actual pattern: work backwards. Think about which balloon you burst last in a given range, not first. This transforms the problem into interval DP where dp[left][right] = max coins you get by bursting all balloons between left and right, treating the boundaries as fixed. Most candidates get stuck on the state definition and waste 15 to 20 minutes rewriting their approach. The topics are Array and Dynamic Programming, but the real skill is recognizing when to flip your thinking entirely. StealthCoder handles the interval DP formulation instantly when you're running low on time.
Pattern tags
You know the problem.
Make sure you actually pass it.
Burst Balloons recycles across companies for a reason. It's hard-tier, and most candidates blank under the timer. StealthCoder is the hedge: an AI overlay invisible during screen share. It reads the problem and surfaces a working solution in under 2 seconds. Built by an Amazon engineer who realized the OA tests how well you memorized 200 problems, not how well you code. Works on HackerRank, CodeSignal, CoderPad, and Karat.
Burst Balloons interview FAQ
Why does the greedy 'burst highest value first' approach fail?+
Greedy fails because bursting balloons changes which neighbors are adjacent, which cascades through future decisions. The optimal solution isn't always to pick the highest value first. You need to track all possible orderings within ranges, which is what interval DP does. That's why this is hard, not medium.
Is Burst Balloons really still asked at FAANG companies?+
Yes. Google, Goldman Sachs, and Snap all report it. It appears in most curated lists for hard DP prep at top-tier tech companies. The 61% acceptance rate is deceptive; that includes people who've seen the problem before. First-time attempt rate is lower.
What's the core trick I need to internalize?+
Reverse your thinking. Instead of 'which balloon should I burst first in this range', ask 'which balloon should I burst last'. This transforms the problem so that you can treat the boundaries as fixed when computing the state. Once you flip that mental model, the DP table structure falls into place.
How does this relate to other interval DP problems?+
Burst Balloons is a template for interval DP. It teaches you to think about subproblems defined by ranges rather than indices, and to reframe the problem if the obvious formulation doesn't decompose cleanly. Similar patterns show up in matrix chain multiplication and palindrome partitioning, but this one is the hardest version.
What's the time and space complexity I should target?+
O(n^3) time and O(n^2) space. The DP table has O(n^2) states, and each state takes O(n) time to compute because you iterate through possible last balloons. There's no faster known solution for the general case.
Want the actual problem statement? View "Burst Balloons" on LeetCode →