Aria

Role: Software Engineer

College: Not Specified

Interview Date: Feb 2024

Interview Type: Full-Time

Result: Offered

Difficulty: Hard

Rounds: 3 rounds

Topics Asked: Data Structures (Linked Lists, Trees), Algorithms, Operating Systems, C/CPP, System Design, Memory Management

Experience:

The candidate was contacted via LinkedIn for a Software Engineer position. The interview process consisted of three technical rounds, focusing heavily on Data Structures, Algorithms, C/CPP concepts, Operating Systems, and System Design.

Technical Round 1 (DSA): This round was conducted on Google Meet with CoderPad and lasted for an hour. The interviewer directly presented DSA questions.

• Question 1: Given a binary search tree variant where each node had an additional link to its parent node (struct node { int value=0; node *left=nullptr, *right=nullptr, *parent=nullptr; node(int i):value(i) {}; }). The candidate was asked to complete functions: findMin(node* root), findNext(node* cur) (next node in inorder traversal), and traversal(node* root) (inorder traversal).
• Question 2: Given a binary tree, find the lowest common ancestor (LCA).
• Question 3: Given a 2D matrix of 0s and 1s, find the largest square submatrix of 1s.

Round 2 (Technical): This round involved discussions on C programming and memory management.

• Discussion on how memory is dynamically allocated using malloc/new.
• Asked how free would know how much memory to clear and to implement a custom version of free.
• Asked about tree traversal algorithms and to write inorder traversal algorithm with and without recursion.

Round 3 (Director Round): This round focused on projects and deep technical discussions.

• Extensive discussion around the candidate's past projects and technical approach to their current role.
• Discussion on maintaining a Linux platform.
• Asked how to find files with duplicate content in a given Linux directory. The candidate explained solving it by calculating the MD5 hash of each file and using an unordered_map or unordered_set.

The overall experience was positive, leading to an offer.