Quantbox Research

Role: Software Developer

College: IITD

Interview Date: Not Specified (circa 2021)

Interview Type: On-Campus

Result: Offer Received (candidate accepted another offer)

Difficulty: Hard

Rounds: 2 rounds (Online Assessment + Technical Round)

Topics Asked: CS Fundamentals, C++ (coding, OOPs), Operating Systems, Parallel Programming, Data Structures, Algorithms

Experience:

This experience is for a full-time Software Developer role at Quantbox Research, applied through on-campus placements at IITD.

Online Assessment: This round consisted of 15 CS fundamentals MCQs, to be completed in 20 minutes. Following this, there were three non-Competitive Programming C++ coding questions, with a time limit of 25 minutes.

Technical Round: This was a lengthy and in-depth systems interview, lasting between 3 to 4 hours. It covered a broad range of topics including Operating Systems, C++, and parallel programming. Specific topics discussed were:

• Smart pointer (shared_ptr) implementation
• String class implementation
• Memory pool implementation
• Internal workings of virtual functions
• Lock-free data structures (e.g., multi-threaded linked list, producer-consumer buffer)
• Endianness detection
• Virtual dispatch
• Memory reordering (hardware/compiler level)
• Lazy allocation and malloc internals
• Spinlock and contention optimization
• Read-Copy-Update (RCU)
• Several open-ended follow-up questions

The candidate received an offer from Quantbox but ultimately accepted an offer from Rubrik.