Previous Position - Software Engineer II
Previous Organisation - Sabre
Location - Bengaluru, India
Years of Experience - 1.5 years of Experience

Applied through referral.

Telephonic Conversation with HR (5-10 mins)

HR asked few questions about the current organization - CTC drawn, Expected CTC, tech stack etc.

HR explained interview process - 3 Technical Rounds

Technical Round 1 - DSA + CS Fundamentals
Technical Round 2 - Heavy on Coding (System Design)
Technical Round 3 - Techno Managerial

Technical Round 1: (DSA + CS Fundamentals) ( 1 hr)

Project Discussion- (20 mins)

Interviewer was a tech lead at Lenskart with around 8-9 years of experience.

We started discussing about the project in my previous company which was in Java and Spring boot tech stack. Various questions around it - Database, Microservices, Deployment etc.

Tip: Be thorough with the project regarding its db schema, why only that design is followed, ways of improvement etc.

Problem Solving-

Similar to ( https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/count-pairs-in-array-whose-sum-is-divisible-by-k/)

Problem:
You are given a list of songs where the ith song has a duration of time[i] seconds.
Return the number of pairs of songs for which their total duration in seconds is multiple of 60.

Example 1:
Input: time = [30,20,150,100,40]
Output: 3

Example 2:
Input: time = [60,60,60]
Output: 3

I gave the brute force solution, which was an O(n^2) solution. He asked me to optimize it further.

I came up with a hash map approach but it seems like my approach was incorrect. So, I told him that I could not optimize it further.

Then we jump to next question -

Implement the operations add() and isPresent() of a HashSet in O(1) time.

• I tried implementing it using hash function and tried to achieve O(1) time.
• There were counter questions on how hashset and hashmap are implemented internally.
• Questions regarding loading factor, collisions etc. were asked.
• I was able to explain all of the concepts.

Then last question was based on SQL

In an Employee table, employees belong to three different locations - Bengaluru, Delhi and Chennai. We need to return the count of all the employees belonging to these cities.

I gave the query using group by element, he was satisfied with it.

Conclusion - He asked if I have any questions and then we ended the call.

Overall experience was good, Interviewer was supportive. But I knew that due to the lack of problem optimization I may not be able to get through this round. So, tip is to revise all the DSA concepts well with main focus on arrays and strings.

Verdict: Got the rejection mail after half an hour from HR.