Gravition

Role: Software Engineer

College: IITD (implied)

Interview Date: Not Specified

Interview Type: On-Campus (Full-Time)

Result: Not Specified

Difficulty: Hard

Rounds: Pen-and-Paper Test, Technical Round

Topics Asked: Data Structures, Algorithms (Competitive Programming), Systems Design, Operating Systems, C++, Parallel Programming

Experience:

This experience is from a collection of interview experiences for a full-time Software Engineer role, likely on-campus at IITD.

Pen-and-Paper Test: This test consisted of two competitive programming (CP) questions and two systems questions. The CP problems were roughly Codeforces 1700 level.

Specific Questions (Pen-and-Paper Test):

• Implement concurrent transactions between two bank accounts using locks.
• Remove branching from a given code snippet.

Technical Round: This was described as a "long, in-depth systems interview" lasting 3-4 hours, covering Operating Systems, C++, and Parallel Programming.

Specific Topics/Questions (Technical Round):

• Smart pointer (shared_ptr) implementation.
• String class implementation.
• Memory pool implementation.
• Internal workings of virtual functions.
• Lock-free data structures (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.