Komprise

Role: SDE Intern (leading to Full-Time SDE)

College: B.tech in CSE (2022 Passout)

Interview Date: September 2021

Interview Type: On-Campus (6 months SDE intern + Full time SDE Role)

Result: Selected

Difficulty: Hard (Overall, based on OA difficulty)

Rounds: 6 rounds (1 OA + 5 Interviews)

Topics Asked: Data Structures, Algorithms, Object-Oriented Programming (OOPs), Operating Systems, System Design (basic concepts), Projects, Past Internship Experience, Behavioral Questions.

Experience:

This candidate cleared the interview process for an SDE role at Komprise through an on-campus opportunity, which included a 6-month internship leading to a full-time SDE position. The process consisted of 6 rounds, starting with an Online Assessment followed by 5 interview rounds.

Round 1: Online Assessment (2 Hrs on HackerEarth, Hard)

• Q1: Similar to "Course Schedule II".
• Q2: Required some pre-processing using bit-manipulation (XOR) to optimize the answer for each query, followed by DFS on an n-ary tree.
• Q3: Exactly "Weird Elevators".

Result: Passed. Candidates who solved at least 1 question were selected for interviews on the next day.

Round 2: First Technical Interview (1 Hr, Medium)

The interview began with an introduction and a discussion about the candidate's experience with online vs. offline semesters.

OOPs rapid-fire questions:

• What are the pillars of OOPs?
• What is Abstraction and Polymorphism?
• What do you think is more important/useful concept from above?
• What are different types of Polymorphism?
• What is Inheritance and its types?
• The interviewer showed a Class Inheritance Diagram and asked about the type of Inheritance.

DSA rapid-fire questions about Linked List:

• What is Linked List?
• What is the structure of a Node of Linked List?
• How much memory does a Node require, provided Linked List stores int values?
• What is the time and space complexity of Insertion, Deletion, and Search operations in Linked List?

The candidate was able to answer all questions, and the interviewer was satisfied. Finally, a coding question was asked: Implement a Linked List from scratch, take input from the console, and print the output. The candidate coded a recursive solution in 30 minutes, which was tested with 5 test cases.

Result: Passed.

Round 3: Second Technical Interview (1 Hr, Medium)

Started with introductions. The interviewer directly moved to a DSA coding question: "Given an arrangement of total n items in a row out of which d are distinct. Can we re-arrange them such that no two adjacent items are same?" The candidate answered that if (n/2 + 1) > d, then the output will always be "NO" as at least 2 occurrences of the majority element will always be adjacent, based on the "PigeonHole Principle." The interviewer was satisfied.

Follow-up questions on OOPs and CS concepts:

• What do you know about OOPs?
• What was the need for OOPs? What problem did OOPs solve?
• What is SDC?
• Do you know any Design Patterns?
• Do you know any difference between Java and C++?

The candidate couldn't answer the last two questions about Design Patterns and Java/C++ differences but the interviewer was kind and satisfied with other answers.

Result: Passed.

Round 4: Third Technical Interview (1 Hr, Medium)

Started with introductions and a discussion about previous rounds. The interviewer then moved to DSA implementation questions:

• What is HashTable?
• What is the time complexity of insertion, deletion, and search in HashTable?

Then, Operating Systems questions:

• What is Virtual Memory?
• What is Physical and Logical Address?
• What is process and thread?
• What is the difference between Runtime and Compile Time Error?
• What is a NULL pointer? What will happen if we dereference a NULL Pointer? What type of Error will we get?
• What is paging? What is TLB?

The candidate was able to answer most of the questions.

Result: Passed.

Round 5: Fourth Technical Interview (1 Hr, Medium)

The interview started with an introduction, followed by a discussion of the candidate's projects and past internship experience (approx. 30 min).

Then, a scenario was given: "You are a co-founder of an early-stage Food delivery Startup."

Rapid-fire questions related to the scenario:

• How will you identify if there's unusual load on your backend servers?
• How will you try to estimate the load?
• How will you distribute it?
• How would you like to scale if the estimated load comes out to be huge?

The interviewer's expectation was not a full system design, but basic/key concepts/terminologies about software development and backend engineering. With some hints, the candidate proposed a solution using MultiThreading.

Result: Passed.

Round 6: HR Round (0.5 Hr, Easy)

The interview started with an introduction and questions about the experience of previous rounds.

Behavioral questions:

• Tell me about your journey so far (background, likes, hobbies, interests).
• Why did you choose CSE?
• Some basic non-technical questions from past internship experience and projects.

The HRs gave feedback that the candidate was being considered for the SDE role and concluded with questions about Komprise and its work culture.

Result: Passed. Received email for final selection for Full-time SDE role + 6 months Internship.