My Background:

I was working in a Service based company(1.1 YOE) and completed graduation from tier 3 government college with CGPA 8+ in CSE. I had 4star rating in CodeChef and solved 320+ question in LeetCode, with almost 200 question solved in last 3 month. So I believe I was in good practice(not best, just good :p ) and everyday I use to open linkedIn and apply in all the product based company that were hiring both through connection referrals and general job portal.

Online Assessment (1 hour):

Around 1st week of sept I believe my resume shortlisted and I got OA to be complete before weekend. There were 3 question to complete in 1 hour. The difficulty level was easy/medium. I completed all 3 in allotted time. So I was excited to get a call for further interview rounds.

Few days later, I got congratulations mail with information of upcoming round and asking my favourable time slots. Also they mentioned every round is elimination round, so that was something really interesting. But after sending my preferred time slot in mail, again after almost 1 month, they called me asking my availability again. And my 1st round was scheduled next week, just 5 days later from that day.

First Round (1 hour):

Question 1: DP question, LeetCode medium difficulty question. Not a direct DP question but if you have practiced enough than you must have solved it. I have not solved many question from DP so had hard time solving it and consumed almost 40+min in this question. But it is nice question and with good practice in DP can be solved easily in 15–20mins.

Question 2 : This was adhoc array(LeetCode hard) question. Fortunately I had solved it just few weeks back and the approach was fresh in my mind, so I was able to come up with optimised approach and also have idea of possible edge cases. So was able to solve in time.

Apart from DSA I also got CS fundamentals questions like how email works, OOPS concepts etc. I also asked one question from interviewer and interview ended.

After that round 2 was scheduled 4–5 days after 1st round.

Second Round (1 hour):

Question 1: LinkedList (tricky, difficulty — medium )This question were mostly to check my critical thinking skill and question was hypothetical were I was restricted to use all the common approaches. So it was really fun solving and discussing out of the box approaches with interviewer. There were many follow up, all the approaches I use come up with, it used to get accepted by the interviewer and then the interviewer use to add that in restriction list and I was asked to think with this new restrictions. Finally I was able to answer all follow up for this question.

Question 2: recursion — (Difficulty Hard). This was totally new question for me and also took 15+min just to understand the question exactly. Then I tried to think of optimised approach but no luck. So eventually I coded a simple brute force recursion.

The interviewer also asked few CS question related to ACID properties etc and basic OOPS questions. I also asked one question from interviewer and interview ended.

After that round 3 was scheduled 4–5 days after 2nd round.

Third Round (45min):

This is a managerial round. The question in this round were related to Resume. They wanted to know about my previous work experience and will I be comfortable in working with their team tech stack and all. Some other good tricky behavioural questions were also there like, How can I use my CP skill in doing development work, etc. There were lots of Technical discussions on DSA/Algorithm/OOPS/CS fundamental/Work Experience.

HR round:

Basic HR question like why I am looking for switch, some question from resume etc.

Result: After a 2–3 week got some verbal confirmation and few weeks later got actual offer later.🎉