1. Phone screen round had 2 coding questions:

   • LCA of a Binary Tree
   • Cutting Ribbons (Link - https://leetcode.com/problems/cutting-ribbons/)

   I was able to explain my approach & code for both questions.

2. Behavioural Round:

   • How do you cope with negative feedback ?
   • Tell about a time you got into a conflict with your manager or peer and how did you work to resolve it.
   • Tell about a time where you could not meet deadlines for a critical project

   There was a lot of cross questioning in this round. My advise would be to be very honest in this round and have examples of such instances in the back of your mind before the interview.

3. Coding Round 1:

   • Balance parentheses - https://leetcode.com/problems/minimum-remove-to-make-valid-parentheses/
   • Find local minima in an array, had a follow up question where they asked me if my approach would work for case where there could be duplicates in the array.

   I was able to explain my approach and code both questions, but my code did have some minor bugs.

4. Coding Round 2: (I found this round challenging)

   • It was a variation of Valid Number problem on leetcode - https://leetcode.com/problems/valid-number/. The interviewer told me that the input will not have any exponents. I don't think the interviewer expected me to come up with DFA approach. He didn't really give any inputs to me for this question.
   • It was a variation of unique paths problem - https://leetcode.com/problems/unique-paths/. The interviewer told me that the input would be an N*N matrix. I had not solved this question before, I had reduced it to the problem of permutations, but I could not code it in time even though my approach was right.

5. System Design: Design Instagram. The interviewer seemed quite friendly and made me feel comfortable during the interview. I feel I could have done better though. It was my first attempt at a design round and I was a little nervous.

Result: They want to schedule a follow-up coding round.

EDIT 1

I gave a follow up coding interview last week, but haven't heard from them yet!

EDIT 2

i thought i did well in follow up coding round, but received a rejection from them yesterday with no feedback from recruiter.

EDIT 3:

my recruiter got back saying that I did not perform well in follow up round. Im quite disappointed because I solved both questions!