Prior to Interview

Experience: 2.5 YOE at FinTech
Education: BE CS at Tier 2 college in India
Position: Software Developer 1
Location: India
Interview Date: August / September 2021

Interview

Round 0

Online coding assessment

- 2 questions
	- Question 1 - Given an array of integers determine the number of ways the entire array can be split into two non-empty subarrays, left and right, such that the sum of elements in the left subarray is greater than the sum of elements in the right subarray (Medium)
	- Question 2 - Graph - Shortest path  (Hard)
- Solved first question completely
- Solved second question partially (50% test cases)

Round 1

Technical Coding Interview

- 2 medium level questions
	- Question 1 - Scheduling problem ( Stack based approach )
	- Question 2 - Number of elements in a BST in a given range ( BFS traversal )
- Tell me about a time when you worked on a project under constraints
	- What safrices did you make inorder to achieve the end result in the given constraints?

Round 2

Technical Coding Interview

- 2 medium level questions 
	- Question 1 - Find the nearest smaller numbers on the left side in an array
	- Question 2 - Find the number of islands in matrix
- Tell me about a time when you made a mistake or failed

Round 3

High Level System Design Interview

- Design a URL shortener system
- Discussed on high level design of an previous project on resume
- Tell me about a time when you faced an obstacle

Round 4

Low Level System Design Interview

- Design a Cricket scorecard manipulation system (Cricbuzz)
- Discussed design patterns used in an existing project on resume
- Tell me about one of the accomplishments you are proud of

Post Interview

Offer

- Received a call from recruiter in 2 days from the last interview that they will be rolling out an offer soon
- Received call for salary details after 7 days from the last interview

Negotiation

• Did not negotiate salary as did not have any competing offer

Compensation

The offer consists of three parts -
- Base Salary (Inclusive of HRA, LTA, etc.) - Tentative Range during that time was 24-32 LPA 
- Joining Bonus - Split between year 1 & 2. Usually more than half of the base salary - Tentative Range during that time was around 25-35 LPA with split of 65% over first year and 35% over second year.
- Stock Units - Split over 4 years with minimum percentage (sometimes 0 units in year 1) - Tentative number of stocks vested over complete 4 years would be from 15-25 units.

Tips

• Prepare/ Read all the questions (except advanced level data structures) mentioned in the Data Structures on GFG
• Data Structures/ Topics to practice
  • Arrays, Strings, LinkedList (Circular, Doubly), Stack, Queue
  • Binary Tree, BST, Min Heap, Max Heap
  • Topological Sorting, Shortest Path algorithms, Kadane's algorithm, Basic Dynamic Programming problems (LIS, LCS, Matrix based)
• Focus on leadership principles is high, so never ignore preparing 'Leadership principles'
  • You can ask your recruiter the tentative leadership principles for which you should prepare your answers for
  • Make sure you design or write down (during the preparation phase) answers in STAR format for all the possible questions
• There is no standard question set that interviewers use, hence, your questions may vary extremely depending upon the interviewers
• Be careful while accepting the offered shares units, make sure the number of shares you receive at the end of first year is a integer
• Suggested preparation timeline (Not mine)
  • DSA - 1 month (LeetCode FAQs + GFG problems mentioned above) (Number of questions depend on individuals)
  • System Design - 1 month (The content below will require more than 2-3 weeks of study to understand all the necessary details and would recommend 1-2 week of rough practice)
• System Design
  • Gaurav Sen (All HLD YT Videos recommended)
    • HLD Titles to look for YT videos
      • Content Delivery Network (CDN), Horizontal vs Vertical Scaling, Relational SQL vs NoSQL, Database Sharding, Load Balancing, Distributed Caching, Publisher Subscriber Model
      • Examples HLD of WhatsApp, Netflix, Tinder, Instagram, Tiktok
      • TicTacToe LLD
  • Soumyajit Bhattacharyay (YT channel)
    • LLD Titles to look for YT videos
      • Examples of BookMyShow, Stackoverflow, ATM
  • The Tech Grant (YT channel)
    • All design patterns (Singleton, Decorator, Strategy, Bridge, etc.) for LLD preparation
  • The Code Mate (YT channel)
    • Coding Interview Series (Playlist) for OOP concepts
  • Udit Agarwal (YT channel)
    • Videos including 'Low Level System Design' in title
• To summarize System Design preparation -
  • Watch as much videos mentioned above as possible
  • Understand the what structure/ pattern is applicable for which usecase
  • Be aware of at least 2 software examples of each option (For example, if you are using NoSQL, be aware of advantages/ disadvantages of DynamoDB, MongoDb, etc. Same goes for Load Balancer, Cache, etc.)
  • For early career SDE2 interviews, higher weightage is given to LLD interviews