Status: B.Tech Information Technology Tier-2
YOE: 2 years 11 months
Position: SDE1 at FinTech firm
Location: Delhi
I applied via employee referral.
Online Assessment - The questions were LC - Easy but I don't remember them.
Round 1 - Coderpad (1hr)
- Deepest Node in a directed graph (previously asked in GS coderpad rounds) - refer this
- https://leetcode.com/problems/find-the-winner-of-the-circular-game/
I could not complete the code of the 2nd question. I was almost done but could not finish and run so the interview requested for another 30 mins session to do a different question. I had never experienced this before and I found this to be a great idea, to give someone a second chance.
Round 1 Extension - Coderpad (30 mins)
https://leetcode.com/problems/median-of-two-sorted-arrays/
I suggested the brute force approach of merging two sorted arrays and then finding the middle element.
Follow up: Merge two sorted arrays without extra space. Sorted elements should be placed in the two arrays as follows:
Input:
arr1: [1 5 7 9]
arr2: [2 3 4 6]
Output:
arr1: [1 2 3 4]
Arr2: [5 6 7 9]Round 2 - Coderpad (1hr)
- https://leetcode.com/problems/house-robber-ii/
First I coded the recursive top down appproach which used extra space, then they asked me to code the bottom up iterative approach. - https://leetcode.com/problems/candy/ - Brute force O(n^2) code was accepted
Round 3 - Coderpad (1hr) (Did not have to write any code during this round though)
- You are given a very large file, you cannot load entire file in memory at once (RAM is limited). Now sort the entire file and write back to another file. - Interviewer provided hints for this one. He suggested leveraging the disk memory where the entire file was stored. A merge sort type of approach was finally accepted.
- Lots of JAVA questions. I remember the following:
- Internal working of a HashMap
- Why is HashMap load factor 0.75?
- Exceptions in JAVA
- Output question on Exceptions
- Strings in JAVA - Ways to create a string. How are string stored in JAVA etc
- Ways to implement a HashMap like data structure using an array
- How will you create a Singletion class in JAVA which is thread safe and protected from Clonnable etc?
- Use cases of Singleton class
- Method overloading and method overriding
- Access modifiers in context of method overrding
Round 4 - Design (1hr)
- Short discussion on projects and tech stack used
- Design the connection degree feature of LinkedIn. It boiled to a DS question which required me to find the distance between two nodes.
Discussed and coded a BFS approach. Since this was an LLD round, I coded the classes that would be used in addition to the BFS algo.
The interviewer asked me to dry run on a test case, during which I found some bugs and fixed them. - Exceptions ecountered while reading and writing from DB and how can one handle them - Did not do well on this question. I did not have much exposure to this in my work.
- How would you a parse a file from memory and write it to db using multiple threads while maintain the original sequence? I suggested reading using multiple threads but writing sequentially. Interview did not seem convinced but I could not come with anything better and we ran out of time.
LC Community please free to provide ideas for 2nd and 3rd question.
Round 5 - Hiring Manager (1hr)
- Short discussion on projects
- Why do you want to leave your current firm?
- What are you looking for next?
- Why do you want to Goldman Sachs?
- How would you handle a situation at work where "You have shared confidentail data of one client with another"?
- What are your biggest strengths and weaknesses and why?
- Talk about your biggest achievement at work so far (a proud moment)
- Egg dropping puzzle
Other interview experiences: