I recently had my first interview for the SDE-1 position at Allen Digital, which was a machine coding interview conducted by barraiser—a third-party company that handles interviews for other firms. I had around 10 months of experience.

I was tasked with designing an entire Vaccination Booking System in 100 mins. It was a 120 mins long interview, the first and last 10 mins were given for discussions. I was needed to think as well as code my entire system in 100 mins.

The interviewer had come up with his own entire set of requirement for vaccination booking system. I was required to create APIs/functions for each requirement. The main requirements were:-

1. Add the users and vaccination centers.
2. Each vaccination center have a different capacity on each day and they are located in different district and states. We can modify/add the capacity to the vaccination center for each day.
3. Get the capacity of each vaccination center of any nth day.
4. List of all the vaccination centers in a particular district.
5. Allow the users to book a vaccination slot, return a booking id and decrease the capacity of the vaccination center. Also, check if the user's age is eligible to book a vaccination slot ie if he/she is above the age of 18 and if the vaccination center have the required capacity.
6. The user can also cancel his booking using the above mentioned booking id. In this case you also have to free up the capacity of the center.

I was able to code a working system with above mentioned requriements within the defined time limit.

Also there was one more bonus requirement apart from all the above requirements, this wasn't complusory but since my time was over I asked him to give 5 extra mins since it was a pretty basic requirements but he asked me just upload the code and get on the discussion part.

The discussion was just focused on how I tackled the problem and what was my solution to the problem.

Key Takeway - Spend just a little time on discussing the problem probably not more than 15-20 mins and focus more on writing the code. In such type of interview, the interviewers expect you to code the complete working solution rather than just discussing the solution.

Verdict - I got a call from the HR next day that i have been selected and my next round would be a DSA round.

Compensation Details - https://leetcode.com/discuss/post/6904922/allen-digital-sde-1-backend-compensation-av8h/

Interview Experience -
Round 2 - Coming Soon
Round 3 - https://leetcode.com/discuss/post/7606642/allen-digital-hiring-manager-sde-1-may-2-jzqf/