Most Beautiful Item for Each Query
A medium-tier problem at 62% community acceptance, tagged with Array, Binary Search, Sorting. Reported in interviews at razorpay and 1 others.
You're scanning an array of items with price and beauty ratings, and the query wants the most beautiful item up to a certain price. Razorpay and Postmates have both asked this. The trap is thinking you need to recalculate from scratch for each query. With 60% acceptance, most candidates are either grinding it out with brute force or they're missing the sorting and binary search pattern entirely. If you blank on the optimization during your live assessment, StealthCoder surfaces the clean solution invisibly. The problem tests whether you can preprocess once and then answer each query in logarithmic time instead of linear.
Companies that ask "Most Beautiful Item for Each Query"
Most Beautiful Item for Each Query 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. Made by a working Amazon engineer who got tired of watching qualified friends bomb OAs they'd solve cold in an IDE.
Get StealthCoderThe key move is to sort items by price, then build an auxiliary array tracking the maximum beauty seen so far at each price point. Once that's built, each query becomes a binary search for the price threshold followed by a lookup of the best beauty value in range. Most candidates either iterate through all items per query, eating O(n*q) time, or they sort correctly but skip the preprocessing step that makes binary search actually useful. The trick isn't the binary search itself, it's realizing you need to precompute the running maximum beauty as you traverse sorted prices. That insight separates the O(n log n) solution from the TLE. If the pattern doesn't click during your assessment and you hit a wall, StealthCoder runs the solve in real time while the proctor sees nothing.
Pattern tags
You know the problem.
Make sure you actually pass it.
Most Beautiful Item for Each Query recycles across companies for a reason. It's medium-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. Made by a working Amazon engineer who got tired of watching qualified friends bomb OAs they'd solve cold in an IDE. Works on HackerRank, CodeSignal, CoderPad, and Karat.
Most Beautiful Item for Each Query interview FAQ
Is this problem actually a binary search problem or just Array and Sorting?+
All three topics matter. You sort the items by price, then binary search for the price threshold on each query, then use a precomputed beauty array to answer in O(log n). Skip binary search and you'll time out. The sorting and the precomputation are what make the search possible.
What's the most common mistake candidates make?+
Rebuilding the answer from scratch for each query instead of preprocessing once. If you're iterating through the entire items list on every query, you're in O(n*q) and will fail large test cases. Build the max-beauty-per-price array once before answering any queries.
How does this relate to real backend systems?+
E-commerce platforms at Razorpay and Postmates need to answer 'best item under budget' queries fast. With millions of products and thousands of concurrent queries, you can't recalculate every time. This pattern is exactly how you scale that.
Is 60% acceptance rate high or low for a Medium?+
It's below the median for Medium problems. That usually signals the preprocessing step or binary search setup isn't obvious to most candidates. The logic is simple once you see it, but the jump to the optimized version trips people up.
What if I get stuck on this during my assessment?+
Start with brute force to pass small cases, then optimize. If you can't see the preprocessing trick in time, StealthCoder runs the full solution invisibly during your screen share. It's your safety net for exactly this kind of time-crunch moment.
Want the actual problem statement? View "Most Beautiful Item for Each Query" on LeetCode →