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Role: SDE 2

College: Tier 3 College

Interview Date: Nov 2024 (Process started Sept 2024)

Interview Type: Full-Time

Result: Selected (Implied by "Offer Details" in source)

Difficulty: Easy to Hard

Rounds: 5 rounds (Online Assessment, 4 interview rounds)

Topics Asked: OOPs, Data Structures, Algorithms (Priority Queue, Greedy, Binary Search, String Subsequences), System Design (HLD), Java Implementation, Behavioral

Experience:

The candidate, with 4+ years of experience, was contacted by a recruiter via email in September 2024 with an opportunity and a HackerRank link for an Online Assessment.

Online Assessment: (02 Sept 2024) Consisted of two questions.

• Question 1: OOPS - a basic Java question to design an interface and implement a class (Easy).
• Question 2: DSA - using priority queue + greedy (Hard).

The recruiter scheduled the first round in October 2024.

Round 1: DSA (1 hour, Interviewer: Data Engineer 3, 10-08-2024 - *Note: Date seems inconsistent with Sept 2024 start*)

• Question 1: Enhanced Binary Search problem (Medium) - LeetCode Problem: "Find the Smallest Divisor Given a Threshold".
• Question 2: Print all sub-sequences of a String (Easy/Medium).

Round 2: System Design - HLD (1 hour, Interviewer: SDE 2, 15-08-2024 - *Note: Date seems inconsistent with Sept 2024 start*)

• Design a Key-Value Pair Database based on file-system storage.
• How to optimize get and put scenarios.
• Discussion on performance impact and caching used.

The recruiter reached out again to schedule the next two rounds.

Round 3: Role Specialization JAVA (1 hour, Interviewer: MTS 2, 15-08-2024 - *Note: Date seems inconsistent with Sept 2024 start*)

• Question 1: Circular cipher based question. Decode a string with a provided value of k.
• Question 2: Java Implementation based question on HackerRank to implement a constructor, custom sorting using a comparator, and the implementation of the above cipher question.

Round 4: Bar Raiser - Behavioral (1 hour, Interviewer: Senior Development Engineer, 25 OCT 2024)

• Introduction from both sides.
• Questions on team conflicts faced and how they were handled.
• Detailed discussion on technologies used and why.
• How to manage adjusting to a new team.
• How to reach out to a manager/skip manager.

Tips: Prepare all possible behavioral questions.