Role: Senior Software Engineer (SSE) / Data Platform Team
College: Not Specified
Interview Date: January 2024
Interview Type: Onsite / Full-Time
Result: Selected
Difficulty: Medium to Hard
Rounds: 4 Technical Rounds + 1 HM Round + 1 HR Round (with an additional HM round later)
Topics Asked: Data Structures, Algorithms, SQL, System Design (HLD/LLD), Projects, AWS services, Behavioral, External Sorting
Experience:
This candidate, with 3+ years of experience, was contacted by a recruiter on LinkedIn and had an onsite interview process in Bengaluru in January 2024 for an SSE role. The process was expedited and involved multiple technical, HM, and HR rounds.
Technical Round 1 (1 hour):
- Basic Project Discussion.
- Asteroid Collision Problem (LeetCode problem).
- Count all Islands (Connected Components in a graph).
- SQL Queries around Deduplicating data.
- How would you perform deduplication at scale?
Technical Round II (1 hour):
- Project Discussion.
- Kth largest element in an array (interviewer looked for the optimized solution).
- Postorder traversal of a Binary Tree using one stack and two stacks (iterative). The candidate was a little slow with the single-stack approach.
Technical Round III (1 hour - Design Round): This was a mix of HLD and LLD, expecting class and DB schema design.
- Project Description.
- Design a user-generated content system for posting reviews and ratings.
- Questions on how various parts of the service would be handled, censoring of reviews, and calculating average ratings.
- Tech questions regarding advantages of using one technology over another in the design.
Technical Round IV (1 hour - DSA): This round was taken because feedback from Round 2 indicated a "weak hire," possibly due to the speed of coding the single-stack postorder traversal.
- Brief Discussion on projects.
- Max size square in a matrix (LeetCode problem).
- Most stones removed in same row or same column (LeetCode problem).
HM Round (30 mins):
- Deep dive on projects.
- Why particular choices were made in projects.
- Questions on AWS services and their use cases (e.g., AWS EC2, Lambda).
- Behavioral questions: Tell me about a time when you worked under tight deadlines. Tell me about a time when you received constructive feedback.
HR Round (30 mins):
- Brief career progression intro.
- Favourite place to work so far and why.
- Career aspirations and where you see yourself in the next 5 years.
- Why do you want to join Myntra?
- Why do you think we should hire you?
Edited HM Round (1 hour - for Data Platform Team): After the initial process, the candidate was called for another HM round as they were deemed better suited for the Data Platform Team.
- Basic Introduction and Projects.
- Find missing number in an array. What if multiple numbers are missing? (HM looked for less than O(max_number) time complexity).
- How does `ORDER BY` query work in SQL? -> External Sorting: How to sort a large file using a small amount of RAM (e.g., RAM = 1GB and file size = 100 GB). Explained External Sorting using chunking + Merge Sort, focusing on the merging step and indexing chunks.
Overall Experience: The candidate was selected for the Data Platform Team role.