Status: BE, Information Technology - Tier 2
Experience: 1 year 10 months
Position: MTS2, VMware
Location: Bangalore , India
Arcesium recruiter reached out to me in Feb 2022 for an opening for Senior Software Engineer position. Not sure how the recruiter got my email. Maybe because I had applied to DE Shaw when I was back in College.
After asking for my resume, recruiter sent me an OA Link which was on HackerRank and had 3 questions:
OA: ( 90 mins )
It had 3 DSA questions.
- Positive Product
- Weird Stock
- Hydrate Nodes
All three can be found on Leetcode Discuss
I got an email a couple of weeks later that they have freezed the hiring and I will be considered if they open their hirings again.
I got a call from the recruiter in first week of May 2022 that they would like to schedule interview rounds.
Round 1: DSA ( 60 mins )
This round was taken by 2 SSE's
I was asked this question : https://leetcode.com/problems/median-of-two-sorted-arrays/
I came up with the brute force solution of merging both the arrays and sorting it.
Then came up with linear time approach.
Later came up with Binary Search approach. Interviewer was happy with the solution. Had covered edge cases as well in the end.
Was asked to dry run the code ( I messed up a little here )
Recevied call after 3-4 days that they want to schedule the design round.
Round 2: HLD(75 mins)
This round was taken by 1 Engineering Manager and 1 Tech Lead.
Problem statement was to design a storage system where users can upload and download their photos based on the subscription model ( I guess something like Flickr
I gathered requirements and went ahead with the design.
I listed down all the tables in the database that will be required. Later explaining the flow drew the high level architecture of my design. I was cross questioned a lot. How will the communication between these services happen ? What will happen if this node goes down / gets busy ? It was a healthy discussion. Interviewer told me that I was going in the right direction.
I received an email the very next day by the recruiter that they want to schedule HM Round and this will be mostly be focused on OOPs and Networks.
Round 3: HM and Tech Round ( 45 mins )
Interviewer was Head of Cloud Infra with more than 16 years of Experience. He was very chill and friendly.
Started off the interview with the introduction. I already knew who the interviewer was as his email was shared in the invite.
As I am in the Cloud team at my current organisation, he asked me have you used any other cloud offerings?
He asked what services have you used in AWS ? ( I was expecting this as I had already seen his profile on LinkedIn)
I mentioned EC2, S3, Redshift, DynamoDB, SQS.
He asked why did you use Redshift and what was the usecase ? Answered this well.
He did ask me If I had used any other services which he mentioned, I clearly said no as I am very bad with coming up with fake answers.
Later, he asked a design problem. Say if you have 1 producer server which sends messages to 5 other consumer servers. How will your design look like. I mentioned we can use Kafka as a message stream and I am assuming it will be a very chatty application and Kafka supports high write throughput. He seemed ok with the design. Later asked how will the design look like if the application is receiving very less number of messages. I mentioned long polling ( forgot to talk about websockets here ).
I was then asked what are views in databases ? I hadn't revised this but I had recently read about materialised views so explained him what it is. He asked what databases have you used which supports Materliased Views ? I mentioned Postgres.
What are indexes in database? How do they work ? Answered this well.
I was given a DBMS query to write involving JOINS. It was rather a simple JOIN query and did this real quick.
I was asked to implement a thread safe singleton. I had watched De*ogTech video related to this so answerd this well with Double Checked Locking. Forgot to add a static keyword in the reference variable and the method. He pointed this out.
Later he asked a puzzle where two trains are approaching at a particular speed and there's a bird sitting at the first train. Find the distance covered by the bird before train tocuhes each other.
I arrived at a answer after his help. ( Not really good with Puzzles but tried my best )
I beleive this interview went well and the interviewers in all the rounds were helpful and friendly.
I had good experience with the recruiter as well ( as of now :P )
I had called the recruiter yesterday , where the recruiter mentioend that the internal meeting is yet to happen for the final decision. It has only been 2 days since I gave the HM Round. How much time does it generally take to get the final result ?
Round 4: HR ( ~35 mins )
Really cool HR. Asked about my hobbies, interests, family , why i want to join Arcesium, Why leaving current org?
I was asked to name top 3 companies I would like to work for and If I get offer from one of them say tomorrow, Why will you not take that offer?
Couple of more trick questions, but answered them well.
Then we had a discussion on compensation.
Compensation: https://leetcode.com/discuss/compensation/2126839/Arcesium-or-SSE-or-Bangalore