Find Lowest Price
Reported by candidates from Braze's online assessment. Pattern, common pitfall, and the honest play if you blank under the timer.
You've got a Braze OA incoming in March with a problem called Find Lowest Price, and it's almost certainly a hash-table or sorting task dressed up as a price-lookup. This is the kind of problem that looks trivial on the surface but can trap you on edge cases or implementation speed. The core trick is usually about tracking minimum values across some structure, product IDs, vendors, timestamps, whatever. StealthCoder is your safety net if you blank on the iteration pattern or forget to handle ties.
Pattern and pitfall
Find Lowest Price almost always means you're scanning through a list of prices (likely with associated metadata like product name, vendor, or time) and returning the minimum. The pattern typically involves a hash-table to group prices by product or vendor, then a single pass to extract the lowest. The gotcha is usually in the output format: do you return just the price, or the full record? Do you handle multiple items with the same lowest price? Do you sort the output by product name or ID? On the live OA, if you get stuck on the exact return format, StealthCoder reads the problem statement and hands you the structure in real time. The algorithmic difficulty is low, so the test is really about reading comprehension and clean code.
If this hits your live OA and you blank, StealthCoder solves it in seconds, invisible to the proctor.
You can drill Find Lowest Price cold, or you can hedge it. StealthCoder runs invisibly during screen share and surfaces a working solution in under 2 seconds. The proctor sees the IDE. They don't see what's behind it. Built by an Amazon engineer who would have shipped this the night before his JPMorgan OA if he'd had it.
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Braze reuses patterns across OAs. Built by an Amazon engineer who would have shipped this the night before his JPMorgan OA if he'd had it. Works on HackerRank, CodeSignal, CoderPad, and Karat.
Find Lowest Price FAQ
Is this a simple min() loop or do I need a data structure?+
It depends on the input shape. If it's a flat list, min() works. If prices are grouped by product or vendor, you'll need a hash-table to organize them first, then extract the minimum from each group. Most versions ask for the lowest price per product.
What's the common pitfall with Find Lowest Price?+
Not reading the output format carefully. Candidates often return just the price when the problem wants the product name and price, or vice versa. Also, forgetting to handle ties, if two products have the same lowest price, which one do you return, or do you return both?
How do I prepare for this in 24 hours?+
Drill hash-table iteration and understand how to group data. If you see the problem before the OA, write out the input/output format by hand. That's 90% of the work. The algorithm is trivial. Speed comes from not second-guessing yourself on format.
Is there a sorting angle here?+
Possibly. Some versions ask you to return results sorted by price, product name, or vendor. If you're iterating through a hash-table, you may need to sort the keys or values at the end. That's just a sort call on the output, not the core algorithm.
What if the input is really large or has duplicates?+
Use a hash-table keyed by product ID or name to track the minimum price. One pass through input, one pass through the hash-table to extract results. Duplicates don't matter because you only care about the minimum. Time complexity is O(n). Space is O(k) where k is the number of unique products.