Oracle OCI | IC2 | Seattle | March 2020 | Offer
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OracleSeattleInterview

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Degree: MS in Software Engineering
YOE: 1 yr as Full time at a Startup in India and 10 months as Intern in USA
Position : IC2
Result: On Hold (because of ongoing Hiring Freeze across all OCI)

Reached out to various Hiring managers of Oracle OCI and personally pinged them on LinkedIn. One of did reply (but after a month) and luckily and coincidently, I happen to apply on the particular req through careers page which is under her team.

Initial Phone Call:
This is initiated by the Hiring Manager where they brief you about the role, interview process and will go through your resume and als expalin how OCI is competiting against AWS and Azure.

Phone Screen: 1hr
One of the members of the team interviewed me.

  • First 25 minutes was about my resume , projects, why Oracle OCI and some behaviour questions
  • For next 35 minutes, he gave me a string question which I need to compress it. It was an easy question, which can be done by using HashMap and String Buffer. I explained the solution and coded with all corner cases within 20 minutes.
  • Then he gave me a follow up question where the string will have other special characters apart from english alphabets, for which I explained him the approach. He didn't want me code though.
  • Last 5 minutes he wanted me to ask whether I have any questions for him.

After 4 working days I received an email stating that I have cleared my Phone screen and will be moving for an on-site interview.

**In comes COVID-19 **

I again receive email that Oracle is moving with virtual interviews and I have to reschedule my interview with new dates (but they didn't provide any confirmation to previous dates I provided)

Then I finally gave my virtual onsite on March 20, 2020 which consisted of 5 rounds.

Virtual On-site: 5x60 minutes
*Round 1 (Hiring Manager, 60 minutes): *

  • She introduced herself and her team and asked about my introduction(10 minutes).
  • Then she asks me to explain a project which I am proud of and some cross questioning (10 minutes).
  • Design a url shorten ( only functional requirements). (10 minutes)
  • All Pevious work experience and what all did you learn (10 minutes)
  • Some behaviour based questions to see how I will fit in a team and how I will handle multiple tasks and conflicts at workplace. (10 minutes)
  • Then she informs me that Oracle OCI is on a hiring freeze.
  • (This made me a tense. It kinda made me non-enthususiastic about the coming rounds).
    And then she left 5 minutes before to give me a small break.

Round 2 (Product Manager, 60 minutes):
It was a vague round. The PM was not associated to the team I was interviewing. There were no technical questions. It was all behavioural questions on what I performed at my previous and current workplaces.
This was a complete 60 minutes interview

Round 3 (Technical Round, 60 minutes):
This was taken by one of Staff Engineers of the team (Took me sometime to understand her accent)

  • Each other's Introduction(10 minutes).
  • Explanation of one of my projects mentioned on my resume (10 minutes).
  • A PriorityQueue(Top k frequent) based question. Since I already solved it on LC knew the most optimal solution. I started explaining the brute force approach and slowly drove to the most optimized solution.
  • Then she asks me to write different test cases to test my algorithm and create custom Exceptions for handling edge cases.
    This interview was over in 50 minutes.

Round 4 (Technical Round, 60 minutes):
This was taken by one of Senior Engineers of the team.

  • Personal Introduction(5 minutes).
  • Explanation of one of my projects mentioned on my resume (10 minutes).
  • Again a PriorityQueue based question about finding max K elements in an array. Similar to the earlier interview, started from brute force to most optimized solution (10 minutes)
  • Coded and wrote all test cases (10 minutes)
    This interview was over in 40 minutes.

Round 5 (Technical Round, 60 minutes):
This was taken by one of Staff Engineers of a different team in OCI.

  • Each other's Introduction(10 minutes).
  • He picked one of the projects mentioned on my resume and asks me to explain it (5 minutes).
  • Asks me about my project that I did during my summer Internship (5 minutes)
  • Again a PriorityQueue based question but this was related to logs in a file which was also easy. Explained him all the approaches involved, but he was also asked me if I can do it using divdie-conquer ie quick-select. Since, I knew a bit about it, I explained him whatever I knew about it and he was satisfied(10 minutes)
  • Coded and wrote all test cases. (15 minutes).
  • Then he gave me a test where I failed to maintain relative order of elements with equal priority. I fixed the issue in my custom comparator and it worked like a charm. (5 minutes)
    Later, he asked me do I have any questions for him.

I think I either got lucky or the team wasn't that much interested in interviewing because each questions in each interview required same data structure.

After a week, I get a call from the Hiring Manager saying that she has put me on hold, because of Hiring Freeze at OCI and will extend the offer after hiring freeze.

EDIT-1:(Updated on September 21,2020):
I finally got the offer on September 4,2020.

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