Agoda

Role: Software Engineer

College: Not Specified (SDE II at Adobe, Noida, UP)

Interview Date: July 31st, 2023

Interview Type: Full-Time

Result: Selected (Offer)

Difficulty: Easy/Medium

Rounds: 5 rounds

Topics Asked: Data Structures, Algorithms, System Design, Concurrency, Thread Safety, Behavioral

Experience:

This candidate, with 4+ years of experience as a Software Engineer II, successfully received an offer from Agoda.

Round 1: Online Screening Round: This round included 3 coding questions (2 problem statements and 1 error resolving question). The difficulty was considered easy if the candidate was good with basics.

Round 2: Coding Round: This round covered DSA topics. Questions included "Min Stack", a Binary search problem similar to "Koko eating bananas", and "Next Greater Element" with a follow-up.

Round 3: System Design: The interviewer asked the candidate to design a music streaming application that fetches top trending songs. Follow-up questions included finding trending songs based on regions, scalability, and fault tolerance (e.g., handling millions of requests). The interviewer also asked to design the data schema and discuss choices of databases. This round was described as a casual and engaging discussion.

Round 4: Coding / Behavioral: This round started with common behavioral questions, followed by a graph problem similar to Toposort (Course Schedule I). The candidate was asked to solve it using both DFS and BFS approaches, providing proper explanations for time and space complexity. The candidate passed this round.

Round 5: System Design / Behavioral: This round included questions on concurrency control and thread safety. The interviewer was keen on understanding the candidate's thought process for creating an API without using in-built Java functions. The candidate used the AtomicLong class in Java and did some hands-on coding. This round was described as "OK-OK, not so good not bad either."