Yahoo

Role: Senior Software Engineer

College: IIT Kharagpur

Interview Date: December (last year, prior to April 7, 2025)

Interview Type: On-Campus, Full-Time

Result: Hired

Difficulty: Not Specified

Rounds: 6 rounds (1 Written Test, 1 Coding Round, 3 Technical Rounds, 1 HR Round)

Topics Asked: Algorithms, Data Structures, OS, Networking, Databases, Math puzzles, Divide and Conquer, Multiple Producer/Consumer problem, OOP (overloading, overriding, virtual, friend functions)

Experience:

Saurav Biswas, from IIT Kharagpur, was hired as a Senior Software Engineer at Yahoo SDC, India, through campus interviews. The process began with a written test comprising 25 objective questions covering basic Algorithms, Data Structures, OS, Networking, Databases, and a few math puzzles. 20 candidates were selected from this round.

Round 2 was a coding round where candidates were given an hour to solve a problem: given a set of 2-dimensional pairs of points, find the two nearest points for each point. The candidate used a recursive divide and conquer approach, achieving O(N log N) time complexity. After the code passed test cases, they were asked to generalize the code for N points (pseudo code). Approximately 10 people were selected for the technical interview rounds.

Round 1 (Technical) involved a math puzzle that required a heuristic approach and solving an inequality with two variables.

Round 2 (Technical) focused on data structures and algorithms, including questions on finding the maximum sum in an array with no two adjacent elements and designing a system for URL shortening. The interviewer was satisfied with the solutions.

Round 3 (Technical) concentrated on Networking, OS, and OOP concepts. The candidate was asked to code the multiple Producer/Consumer problem and answered questions on OOP, such as the difference between overloading and overriding, and virtual and friend functions.

The final round was an HR interview.