Thoughtspot

Role: FTE + Internship (SDE)

College: Not Specified (On-Campus Placement)

Interview Date: Not Specified (Article last updated: 2025-07-12)

Interview Type: On-Campus (Internship + Full-Time)

Result: Offered 6-month internship

Difficulty: Medium to Hard

Rounds: 4 rounds

Topics Asked: Data Structures (Linked List, BST, Stack, Trie), Algorithms (Graph, Dynamic Programming), System Design, Projects

Experience:

This experience describes an on-campus placement process for a Software Development Engineer role at ThoughtSpot, which resulted in a 6-month internship offer.

Round 1: This was a 90-minute online round with three programming questions and seven MCQ-type questions.

• Question 1: Given a linked list with numbers sorted in non-decreasing order, return a Binary Search Tree (BST) built from the linked list.
• Question 2: Similar to the "Snake and Ladder Problem," finding the minimum number of throws to reach a destination on a Ludo board.
• Question 3: Given a string consisting of '()[]{}', find the length of the longest balanced parenthesis.

Round 2: A 60-minute coding round focused on implementing arithmetic operations (multiplication, addition, subtraction, and division) for very long integers. Candidates who solved at least two operations were selected for the next round.

Round 3: A 75-minute one-on-one problem-solving interview with three questions.

• Problem 1 (Parking Lot): Given a parking lot with 'k' slots and 'k' cars (1 to k), and one free slot, output the minimum number of moves to place each car in its respective slot.
• Problem 2 (Dynamic Programming): Similar to the coin change problem, form a total 'k' using only numbers that are powers of 2, ensuring distinct solutions. The candidate provided both recursive and dynamic programming solutions with memoization.

Round 4: This 70-minute round focused on projects and system design. The problem was to design a versioning system supporting push, pop, and viewing the current version number efficiently. The candidate evolved their solution from an array to a stack-based approach, and finally to a trie-based solution, optimizing it further as per the interviewer's guidance. The interviewer also asked about the candidate's projects for about 5 minutes.