Count kth largest element in grid
Last updated: December 16, 2025
Quick Overview
Given a 2D grid of integers, write a function to find the kth largest element in the grid. The function should take the grid and an integer k as input and return the kth largest element. The grid can contain duplicate values, and k will always be a valid index within the grid's total number of elements.
Jump Trading
December 16, 2025223
8
3,752 solved
Given a 2D grid of integers, write a function to find the kth largest element in the grid. The function should take the grid and an integer k as input and return the kth largest element. The grid can contain duplicate values, and k will always be a valid index within the grid's total number of elements.
This coding problem is frequently asked during Technical Screen at Jump Trading. The interviewer is testing your ability to translate a problem into clean, working code while discussing time and space complexity. Jump Trading expects candidates to write production-quality code, not just solve the puzzle.
What the Interviewer Expects
- Identify the correct data structure and algorithm for the problem
- Write clean, bug-free code with proper variable naming
- Analyze time and space complexity correctly
- Handle basic edge cases (empty input, single element)
- Communicate your thought process while coding
Key Topics to Cover
How to Approach This
- Clarify input constraints and edge cases before writing code.
- Walk through your approach verbally and confirm with the interviewer before coding.
- Start with a brute force solution, then optimize. Mention time and space complexity.
- Test your solution with examples, including edge cases like empty input or duplicates.
- Consider common patterns: sliding window, two pointers, hash map, BFS/DFS, dynamic programming.
Possible Follow-up Questions
- Can you solve this iteratively instead of recursively (or vice versa)?
- How would you parallelize this solution?
- What is the worst-case input for your solution?
- Can you optimize the space complexity of your solution?
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Problem Analysis
To find the kth largest element in a 2D grid of integers, we can utilize a max-heap (or a min-heap) approach. The max-heap will allow us to efficiently extract the largest elements from the grid. Sinc...
Approach
- Flatten the Grid: Convert the 2D grid into a 1D list. For example, for the grid [[1, 5], [3, 2]], the flattened list will be [1, 5, 3, 2].
- Build a Max-Heap: Using the
heapqlibrary in ...
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