We don’t know what expectations were set in the interview for the solution space, but anyone with (Unix) ops experience should have the thought “grep can do that” pop into their head. And people with a formal CS education should be able to come up with the dynamic programming solution.

So, whichever side of dev-ops you lean to, there’s a reasonable answer that should be within your field of expertise. And given Palantir’s line of business (the company involved), I wouldn’t be surprised if dissecting a byte string with limited information about it’s structure comes up from time to time in their actual work.