> Is the interview for an engineering position or for sales?

Either way. The coin-flip example and Ballmer's binary search game could apply with simple extensions to complicated processes like SLAs on cloud services.

> The data going to be sorted by merge sort is not going to have anything up its sleeve

That's a curious example, since one reason to use mergesort rather than quicksort is the latter's susceptibility to pessimal inputs.

Physical processes are very often long tailed on the wrong end and thus adversarial though.