You’re interviewing for a backend/data engineering role at a FAANG-level company. The interviewer describes a real product scenario:
A large-scale content platform displays trending items in a rotating banner. Every few minutes, the platform shifts the items to the right so that newer or more relevant content appears first, while older content moves toward the end.
The items are stored in an integer array nums, and the platform performs a right rotation by k steps.
Due to performance constraints:
- The rotation must be done efficiently
- The operation should modify the array in place
- The system should handle very large arrays smoothly
This is a common coding interview / DSA question might ask in Google, Amazon, Netflix, Meta, Apple, Microsoft, Uber, and Bloomberg interviews.
Your Task
Given an integer array nums and a non-negative integer k, rotate the array to the right by k steps.
Input Format
nums: an array of integersk: a non-negative integer representing the number of rotation steps
Output Format
- Modify the array
nums in place so that it is rotated to the right by k steps - Return the rotated array
Examples
Example 1:
Input: nums = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7]
k = 3
Output: [5, 6, 7, 1, 2, 3, 4]
Example 2:
Input: nums = [-1, -100, 3, 99]
k = 2
Output: [3, 99, -1, -100]