Current: 5 years of experience
Location: Bangalore
I applied through LinkedIn and MPL website career page, not sure which one worked, but got the call within a week of applying.
Round 1 (DS & Algo):
- Height and breadth of a binary tree. For some reason my brain was switched off and tried coming up with two different programs, one each for height and breadth. Interviewer quickly corrected me and told me that he was expecting both in same program. I corrected myself and coded the right solution.
- Longest Increasing subsequence. Since I was still in the early stage of my interview season, I was not ready for DP and had not seen even basic questions. I was almost there in the right direction but was not confident. Looking at my confidence, interviewer gave me an option of trying out other question and skipping this. I decided to take it.
- Monotonic array. I coded this up easily in no time.
Feedback: Cleared for next round
Round 2 (Programming and System Design):
- Given an array, each element a[i] in the array is to be replaced by the greatest element in a[i+1] to a[n-1]. Ex: [10, 8, 19, 7, 15, 11] is the array, then result would be [19, 19, 15, 15, 11, -1]. After some thinking, this looked very easy and coded the solution that took O(n) time.
- Ah, the tiny url! This is one of the very basic system design quesion and I was prepared well for this. Gave him the right design with detailed explanations. The reaction of interviewer made me feel that I gave him explanations more than what he was expecting.
Feedback: Cleared. Requested documents to initiate the offer. Meanwhile I had to give a customary People HR interview.
Round 3 (People HR):
This round was just about talking. Questions asked were:
- Usually there is a notion that there are lot of work in startups compared to well settled MNCs. Why do you want to join startup, how will you manage if there is a lot of work.
- Future goals, 5years/10years plan
- One thing I liked about previous companies
- One thing I dint like about previous companies
- Reason to leave first company
- Reason to leave current (second) company
- Reason to join current (second) company
After this round, I received the call from recruiter to negotiate the offer and they offered straight away 55% more than my current even though the ask was bit less. I accepted the offer initially and declined after two weeks.
I think I was lucky here considering the questions that were asked to me especially system design question. One of my friend gave the interview after me and he was grilled in round 2 with a tough system design question.
My other interview experiences: https://leetcode.com/discuss/interview-experience?currentPage=1&orderBy=hot&query=&tag=anonymousengineer