Nutanix | MTS-3 | Bangalore | Feb 2020 [Offer]

Anonymous User

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Nutanix Bengaluru System Design Interview

Status: 2.7 yoe
Position: MTS-3, Nutanix
Location: Bangalore, India
Date: Feb 2020

I recently interviewed at Nutanix Bangalore and would like to share my experience here. I have broken down this post into 3 parts -

Interview experience
Offer and Negotiation
Preparation strategy

I would like to keep this post as generic as possible, as I feel similar kind of preparation is required irrespective of the company.

Interview Experience

Application
I applied through referral. I had a friend who recommended my CV to hiring manager directly. After 2-3 days of referral, I was contacted by recruiter for scheduling telephonic interview round.

In my experience chances of a getting call greatly increase if you have a referral. If you don't know anyone working there, I'd suggest you directly connect with hiring manager / some SDE through linkedIn and ask if they can refer you. Odds are that 2-3 / 10 people will reply and at least 1 of them will be able to refer you. There are tons of articles on internet explaining how to approach people on LinkedIn.

Technical phone screen 1

316. Remove Duplicate Letters
This question can be solved using greedy approach. During interview, I was able to come up with an approach which looked correct to me and interviewer both. But I later realised that it doesn't give correct solution for some set of strings. On the same day recruiter informed that they would like to schedule one more telephonic round since interviewer was impressed with my thought process and problem solving approach.

Technical phone screen 2

This round went well as I was able to finish both the questions in given time. Interviewer did not expect syntactically correct code.

Onsite round 1

Question was around application of topological sort. I do not remember the exact question-

You are given a list of processes with their dependency on each other.
Each process can be run in 1 unit of time. Also you have infinite threads available. 
We have to give minimum units of time required to run all the processes.

I was able to come up with a O(n^2) solution. Interviewer was satisfied with this although interviewer mentioned that it can be done in O(n).

Onsite round 2

Tree conversion

Given a source and target tree (Can have multiple children).
Both source. and target trees have same structure and value of nodes is either 0 or 1.
There are 2 operations which can be performed on any node of source tree
Op 1: Flip the node (0 => 1 | 1 => 0)
Op 2: Flip the entire subtree including the node
Find minimum # of operations required to convert source into target

Onsite round 3
This was supposed to be a system design round. Interviewer started with asking questions from my resume about the projects / technologies I had worked. We also discussed some of the design patterns frequently used in the large systems. Later he also asked 2 DS + algo problems, which unfortunately I don't remember now. But both questions were LC-Medium on greedy.

HM Round

HM round was mainly technical discussions on the projects that I had worked on (Microservices / API design, Request routing, Availability patterns / Failover etc.). Some questions were from the product management side as well. This was a very seamless interactive discussion which I really liked.

Overall I found that the interviewers were really helpful and engaging. In none of the rounds I felt that it was 1 way discussion. All the rounds were more like interactive discussions than question answer rounds.

Offer and Negotiation

Within a week of onsite, I got a call from interviewer informing about the offer. I would like to mention some pointers to negotiate better which helped me in getting ~25-30% on top of initial offer at multiple places. Some are specifically important in context of Indian market.

Know what you are worth, be prepared
- Before diving into salary discussions, you should evaluate the market. How much others with similar experience, background, skillset are getting in that company. Go through discuss section of Leetcode, Blind to get more insight.
- You should have a reasonable TC, Base in mind before getting into negotiation discussions with recruiter.
Never share your current salary
- This is first and most important part of salary negotiations. More often than not, the first question that recruiter asks is "How much you are earning currently?". Recruiters are trained to get this info out of you. This question can come in multiple formats like "What is the breakdown?" "How many times you got hikes?" etc. YOU DON'T HAVE TO ANSWER THAT
- When this question is asked, you can avoid answering by saying anything on these lines-
  - You don't feel comfortable sharing your current salary since you still work with current employer
  - You are in similar discussions with other companies and you were not asked these details there, and this will be really unfair if you tell them these details
- Usually recruiter will come up with "This is the norm that they practice here and you will have to share your current compensation"
  - Ask them if this is official company policy? More often than not recruiter will agree on you not sharing details at this point
  - All this while, remember to show your interest in the position. You should not come off as someone who only cares about compensation
Never accept offer, even verbally, without negotiating

Thing to remember here is that they want to hire you as much as you want to join them if not more. At this point, Hiring Manager has already made up mind about hiring you. Specially if you have done really well in the interviews, you can leverage that during negotiations.
If you hit a road block during negotiations, politely inform recruiter to take couple of days break from negotiations. Most of the times recruiter will come back with revised numbers

Be polite, show interest, express yourself

Negotiations are not you vs them. During negotiations, recruiter and you, both have to work out the situation mutually.
Show them why you are worth more than what they are offering. It can be the experience that you hold, leadership qualities that makes you stand out, strong technical quality which will help them grow.

Preparation Strategy

I am from computer science background so I just had to revise important concepts and algorithms
DS / Algo

Leetcode
Youtube for some algorithms which

System Design

*** the system design interview
Gaurav Sen's playlist on youtube
System design primer on github

Negotiations

Candor Article

Before wrapping up, I really want to thank leetcode community. I have been an active user of leetcode during interview preparation and I was greatly benefitted from discuss section of each question. There are already few posts that people here compiled on how to effectively use leetcode-

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