Salesforce

I interviewed for the Software Engineer Intern role at Salesforce through the off-campus process. The process had multiple technical stages, and I managed to clear the first technical round but couldn't make it through the second one. Technical Round 1 The first round was a coding-focused technical interview and lasted around an hour. The interviewer started with a quick introduction and then moved directly into problem solving. The first question was based on finding the next greater number using the same set of digits. I explained the approach using the idea behind next permutation and then walked through the implementation. The interviewer was particularly interested in the complexity and asked me to explain why the approach worked. The next problem was to rearrange characters in a string such that no two adjacent characters are the same. I discussed the frequency-based approach and used a priority queue to decide which character should be placed next. We also discussed what should happen when it is impossible to construct such a string. After the coding questions, the interviewer asked about the data structures I had used, including heaps, sets, and their underlying implementations. There were also questions about time complexity and why a particular data structure was suitable for the problem. The discussion then moved briefly toward my projects. I was asked about my contribution and some of the technical decisions I had made. The round was quite interactive, with several follow-up questions rather than simply solving one problem and moving on. A short time after the interview, I received the update that I had cleared Round 1. Technical Round 2 The second technical round was again focused heavily on problem solving. The interviewer started with a brief introduction and then moved into a coding/problem-solving discussion. The first problem was based on a dictionary of words where removing one character from a word could create another valid word. The task was to determine the maximum chain that could be formed. I initially thought about the problem recursively, but after considering the constraints, I moved towards sorting the words by length and using dynamic programming with a hash-based lookup. I was able to explain the main idea and derive the recurrence, but I struggled while handling some of the edge cases during implementation. The interviewer asked a few follow-up questions around duplicate words and how the solution would behave for words having multiple possible predecessors. The remaining part of the round involved discussion around problem-solving and my resume. I could explain most of the approaches, but I wasn't as comfortable with the implementation as I had been during the first round. After completing the second technical round, I waited for the final update. Eventually, I received the confirmation that I was not selected for the internship. The experience was particularly useful because the first round went quite well, but the second round exposed the difference between knowing a solution conceptually and being able to implement it cleanly under interview pressure. My biggest takeaway was to practice more unfamiliar variations of standard DSA problems. The Salesforce interviews weren't just about recognizing a familiar pattern; the interviewer kept asking follow-ups and wanted to understand the reasoning behind the solution, the data structures being used, and the complexity. Overall, I was able to clear the first technical round but couldn't clear the second, bringing my Salesforce interview process to an end.