Hi Everyone,

Recently, I appeared for Arcesium Interview. In this post i'm going to share my Interview Experience at Arcesium.

Application
I didn't applied, I just happened to receive mail form the recruiter. Few Days back, A recruiter from Arcesium reached out to me via mail. The Job recruiter shared was SSE (Senior Software Engineer). I politely replied to her that I would like to appear for Software Engineer (1 yrs experienced) instead, as I am not that much experienced, Job description for SSE which Recruiter shared required 3-4 years of experience.

Also, I knew for senior roles, system design i asked, and I wasn't prepared for that. :(

Recruiter replied they would consider me for Software Engineer, although I think that didn't happened in the end. If you are interested to know further, then continue reading my experience.

Round 1: Hacker Rank Assessment

In a day or two after the recruiter's mail, I received the Online Assessment.

1. Maximum Length of Subset with Positive Product (Standard Problem)
2. Weird Stock - Ad Hoc Maths
3. Hydrate Nodes - Tree/Graph Based

Managed to solve 2 problems completely & partially solved the 3rd Problem.

Round 2: Technical Interview I

After few days, I received the mail for the Interview Round 1. On the mail heading, it was still written as SSE | Interview Round 1

The Interview started with my Introduction. Then the Interviewer asked as that I'm 1 year experienced, why I applied for SSE role then. I politely replied that the recruiter assured that its for Software Engineer role.
Then he explained me that this role is Java Specific and you have no experience with Java, so do you want to continue with the Interview?
I replied, I'm Good in C++, and owing to project needs I am open to learn Java as well. As long as your basics are clear, we can switch to any language in some time.

But After this I felt so Interviewer wasn't Interested in taking the Interview, but he asked me questions and didnt let me feel uncomfortable & nervous, so that's the good part :). Almost 15 mins were spent on the above stuff.

He asked following questions:

1. Explain Polymorphism
2. What is Method Overloading & Method Overriding
3. Explain Inheritance
4. What are Abstract Classes
5. Explain Pure Virtual Functions.

Coding Question

You are given a random list of Integers & a target. Find the closest number to target from the array.

Input : [8,11, 16, 7, 9]
Target: 15
Output : 16

I easily solved this question. My approach was to sort the array & then apply Binary Search to find closest number to the target. He was quite satisfied with my approach.

Round 2: Technical Interview II

After few days I received the mail for Round 2, but the same thing SSE | Interview Round 2
The Interview started with the Introduction. Again the same question that you are 1 year experienced & applied to SSE role. I again clarified that recruiter told me its SE role.

The Interview asked me question:
1. What are Mutable Objects & Immutable Objects.

Then he started explaining me problem statement, As soon as he explained, I got it that its a System design question.

Design Question
Design a system, that will help us to store the details of a person, countries he visited & where he stayed in the country & other details.

Something he said like, that values should not get changed by the process in between when we fetch it. This means once stored, it will not change forever (i.e It should be Immutable). I didnt get this completely.

I told him that we can use unordered_map to store person's details. He said that he wanted to see Low Level Design for this.

I told him that, I don't have much knowledge about System Design, but I willl try to think on it. (Obviously, I wasn't expecting System Design Questions for a year experienced)

Then we discussed on this, but clearly he wasn't satisfied with my approaches & answers (That's quite obvious, my answers were random as I had zero prior knowledge, how to handle design questions)

Then he moved to DS Problem - Prune a Binary Tree.
Given a binary tree & a target number, prue binary tree for that number.

Input: 
Target : 2
			5
		/      \
	 2          2
  /    \          \
2       2          1

Output :
   5
    \
     2
	  \
	   1
	   
All the 2's except one are removed from the binary tree. This remained as we have 1 as its child.

I gave a recursive approach for this. He was satisfied with the approach & told me to code it.
I coded it completely.

Then the Interviewer asked if I had any questions for him. I asked few questions & the Interview ended.

Rejection Mail
After 2-3 days, I receieved rejection mail. I am ot unhappy with it as I tried my best and I feel they evaluated me for SSE position only, which is quite obvious as they were mentioning the same in mail & asked me design question as well. (Although verbally recruiter mentioned its SE role, but don't know how things were working there.)

Also, I haven't seen anyone interviewing for Arcesium & getting Design question asked for SDE1 role. So, Either they interviewed me for SSE role only Or may be that's my luck that I was asked design question for 1 year experienced role :(

Hope my Interview Experience helps.
Ps : Ignore grammatical misatkes / Poor English, if any.