Adding an interview experience for Sharechat as I was unable to gather data myself during the interview process. Hopefully this helps someone who might be interested in interviewing with them.
Recruiter reached out over LinkedIn for an SDE-2 position. I was not actively looking for a switch, but I wanted to get some practice done so applied for the position.
Round 1: Hackerearth Coding Test
3 Coding questions were asked. 2 LC Hards 1 LC Medium. The hard questions can be found on leetcode.
Round 2: LLD (1 Hour 30 minutes)
Had to design an orchestration service. This was a fairly original problem. Consisting of a combination of Data Structures concepts and multithreading. Probably the hardest round in the process.
Approx description of problem Statement: You will receive a series of dependenies as inputs. Your orchestrator must be able to process a request received from client and generate a response. There maybe several downstream services interdependent on each other. All processes are CPU intensive.
I was not able to solve the question completely. Was able to code out the core graph algorithm and define all the necessary classes. Ran out of time while trying to apply multithreading. The interviewer was fairly interactive and helpful. Overall a pretty good experience. Learnt a lot from the interview.
Round 3: CS Fundamentals and HLD (1 Hour 30 minutes)
Questions around Databases and OOP principles. Questions were asked about prior project experiences.
HLD Problem: Design a payment system.
Discussion centred around concurrency, locking mechanisms, database decisions and other tradeoffs. This round was my best round.Interviewer was highly knowledgable.
Round 4: Bar Raiser: CS Fundamentals and HLD (1 Hour 30 minutes)
Interviewer didn't seem particularly interested in taking the interview. They were working on something else on the side.
Was able to answer most questions around previous work correctly. Made some mistakes around questions on distributed messaging queues.
HLD question asked: URL shortener. Was able to solve the question completely. But, got stuck on some of the counter questions posed by the interviewer, before resolving and arriving at an answer on my own. Little feedback/prompts was provided from the interviewer.
Received feedback from recruiter.
Overall feedback: Hire
Offer Declined
Offer Details
I had made it clear to HR that I was not willing to negotiate on the numbers. My numbers were fair considering my background. Things did not work out.
The engineering team seems pretty good. Barring the last round, had a pretty good experience interviewing with the company. The HR was pretty prompt and closed out the interview loop fairly quickly. I was highly put off by the way the company executed layoffs and the poor WLB. If the WLB is poor, you should pay well.