Pine Labs

Role: SDE

College: Not Specified

Interview Date: Not Specified

Interview Type: Off-Campus (Referral)

Result: Selected

Difficulty: Medium

Rounds: 3 rounds

Topics Asked: Data Structures and Algorithms, Java-based questions, System Design, Techno-Managerial

Experience:

The candidate interviewed for an SDE role at Pine Labs, with 2.5 years of experience, through an off-campus referral. The preparation focused on Data Structures and Algorithms for 1.5 years, using resources like Codechef, Leetcode, GFG, and Striver's SDE sheet. There were three virtual, eliminatory rounds, each scheduled for 45 minutes.

Round 1:
This round included two DSA questions and several Java-based questions.

• DSA questions: "Max contiguous Sum/Kadane's Algo" and "Find 3rd largest number in an array (no sorting, no extra space shall be used)".
• Java questions: "Why Java strings are immutable?", "Difference between comparator and comparable", "Few predict the output kind of questions", "Auto configuration explanation and how to exclude a config class in Spring?".

Round 2:
This round was based on system design. The candidate was asked to "design a Service to shorten a URL".

Round 3: Techno-Managerial Round
This round was with a very senior person. The question posed was: "You are a freelancer who does projects for clients and seeks money from them in return. Key points for you are: At a time you can take one project only. Once you take a project you will have to finish it before taking another one. Can't work on 2 projects simultaneously. Can't work partially. Irrespective of time and effort you charge an equal amount for all the projects. Given the start and end times along with the name of the project, you have to extract the biggest subset of the project such that none of them overlap." This question was based on the activity selection problem, and the candidate used the same approach to solve it. The candidate had to write the entire working code and demo the output on an online IDE.

The verdict for this experience was "Selected".