/interview-exp

interview experience: sept'23 - nov'23 for sde roles with 2+yoe

  • Target

    Desc: American retail corp.
    Role: Sr Engineer
    Referred by: Aadhar Bhatt
    Recruiter/HM: Sonam Rathore

    Round 1

    Date: Thu, 7th Sept 2023
    Interviewer: Anil Kumar N (Lead Engineer)

    • Given the head of a linked list, determine if the linked list has a cycle in it. (Leetcode Easy)
    • Given the head of a linked list, return the list after sorting it in ascending order in O(n logn) time and O(1) memory (i.e. constant space) (Leetcode Medium)

    Round 2

    Date: Mon, 25th Sept 2023
    Interviewer: Vidhya Manikandan (Lead Engineer)

    • Pair Programming Round - Low Level Design: I was given access to a codebase via Zoom Remote Control to modify certain parts.
      Concepts checked: Typecasting, Exception handling, Factory Design Pattern, SQL v/s NoSQL.

    Verdict: No Offer

    (Personal scrutiny: lacked understanding of Design Patterns)


  • Ford Motors

    Desc: American multinational automobile mfr.
    Role: Backend/ Full-Stack Developer (Python)
    Referred by: Tilak D

    Round 1

    Date: Tue, 26th Sept 2023
    Interviewer: Jnaneswar Vanga (Full Stack Engineer)

    • API Development Round: Develop a REST API using Flask/FastAPI that takes input and does some sort of encryption algorithm on it, since CV mentioned past experience in cryptography (referring FastAPI docs was allowed).
      Use best Software Development practices like creating virtual env, listing dependencies in requirement.txt, etc.

    Verdict: No Offer

    (Personal scrutiny: needed someone with more expertise in the area)


  • Microsoft Research, Bangalore

    Desc: Research subsidiary of Microsoft
    Role: RSDE, DiskANN team
    Recruiter/HM: Harsha Simhadri

    Round 1

    Date: Tue, 19th Sept 2023
    Interviewer: Harsha Simhadri (Principal Researcher)

    • Project-based grilling

    Round 2

    Date: Thu, 28th Sept 2023
    Interviewer: Gopal Srinivasa (Principal RSDE)

    • Implement a stringcopy() function, strcpy(char *src, char *dest) : concepts checked: iteration, pointers, memory-allocation
    • Convert a Binary Search Tree to a Sorted Doubly Linked List (LeetCode Medium)

    Round 3

    Date: Fri, 13th Oct 2023
    Interviewer: Ravishankar Krishnaswamy (Principal Researcher)

    • (Telephonic round/over phone): Given K points (sorted distance-wise from the origin) in a 1D plane, find the closest point to a given point (as query) in O(logn) time.

    Verdict: No Offer

    (Personal scrunity: MSRI heavily lacks HR; extremely busy senior researchers who take interviews themselves; probably looking for more advanced candidate)


  • Microsoft Hyderabad

    Desc: Microsoft India Development Center (IDC)
    Role: SDE-II , People Also Ask team (Bing Relevance)
    Referred by: Anand Raman
    Recruiter/HM: Sunitha Parik / Sandeep Aparajit

    Informational Call

    Date: Fri, Oct 13 2023
    Interviewer: Sandeep Aparajit (Principal Data Science Manager)

    • 30mins call with the HM: 15mins overview of the team (People Also Ask) and the role, 15mins CV review.

    Round 1

    Date: Wed, Oct 25 2023
    Interviewer: Jagjot Singh (SWE-II)

    • Given a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG), do a Topological Sort of it's vertices (Leetcode Medium)
    • Low Level Design: Design a LLD of the Snake & Ladder game.

    Round 2

    Date: Thu, Oct 26 2023
    Interviewer: Venkat Balabhadra (Senior SWE Manager)

    • High Level Design: Design a HLD of Bing People Also Ask.

    Round 3

    Date: Thu, 2nd Nov 2023
    Interviewer: Rajpal Kulhari (Senior Applied Science Manager), Mayank Singh (SWE-II)

    • Project based questions
    • Given an array, return the {start,end} indices such that if you sort the subarray from start to end, the whole array will be sorted (Leetcode Medium)

    Round 4

    Date: Tue, 14th Nov 2023
    Interviewer: Balakrishnan Santhanam (Principal SWE Manager)

    • Behavioral questions:
      • What do you think is the role of a PM in a team?
      • Where do you see yourself in 5 years?
      • etc.
    • Return subtrees in a BST whose nodes lie within a given range (Leetcode Medium)

    Round 5 (As Appropriate Round)

    Date: Tue, 21st Nov 2023
    Interviewer: Sushil Chordia (GM, Engineering)

    • Behavioral questions:
      • Explain one conflict you've faced in team; how did you solve it? What was the learning?
      • Why are you looking for a switch? What are your expectations from the team?
      • etc.
    • Project based grilling
    • Given two nodes in a BST, find LCA (Leetcode Medium)

    Verdict: Offer ⭐ (offer details)



  • Lenovo

    Desc: Chinese multinational technology company
    Role: Search Specialist (Contractual)
    Referred by: Akshatha N

    Telephonic Round

    Date: Thu, 23rd Nov 2023
    Interviewer: Harish Kulkarni (Web Product Manager - Site Search)

    • Project-based questions, "what are your top skills", etc.

    On-Site Round

    Date: Thu, 30th Nov 2023
    Interviewer: Harish Kulkarni (Web Product Manager - Site Search), Supritha Ravi (Senior eCommerce Search Developer)

    • Technical Questions:
      • domain knowledge: explain work ex, workflow/dataflow of search frontend-to-backend, familiarity with Solr/ElasticSearch, filter-based search, etc.
    • Behavioral questions:
      • How good are you in communication, etc.

    Verdict: Got Ghosted ☠️

    (Personal scrunity: Company lacked budget)