Current Employment:

Status: 2.5 Years Experience
Position: Software Engineer 2 at a Startup
Location: Hyderabad, TS, India
Date: March, 2020

Coding Test - [Hackerrank]
Questions :

• https://www..org/find-the-minimum-number-of-steps-to-reach-m-from-n/amp/
• Given sequance of N integers, find max length segment which gives positive product.
• Question related to DFS in tree & and then some processing of the data obtained.
  Time constraing was critical, 1 hour to solve all 3.
  I managed to solve first two, last one only few cases passed.

I got a call from Arcesium a couple of weeks later for scheduling interviews online.

First Round - [Technical]

• Low level design for a system which exposes two APIs:

  • Save Numbers: Which takes N integers and saves in backend
  • GetMedian: Returns median of the numbers stored so far. [Most Frequent Op]
    Discussed approach with TreeSet in Java. Discussion on internals, duplicate integer cases.
    Fundamentals of hashing, TreeSet vs TreeMap.

• Use case of a stock pricing dashboard, where prices are changing frequently. Server which exposes API for this is dying out. CPU Usage for the system is very high. How can you debug and fix such a system. I explained about the possible causes, frequent GC activity, as a quick fix we can increase Xmx value. Are you creating too many objects, can we use singleton at places wherever we can. Exhaustive discussion regarding all these points.

Second Round - [Technical]

• Synchnorization in Java, Gave a use case of EmployeeDetails service, asked me to put conditional synchronization i.e getEmployeeDetails(empId) to only allow five threads at one time, while updateEmpoyeeDetails(empId, EMP) to allow two threads at a time. Basically its about Semaphores in Java. Write readable, maintainable & reusable code for the same.
• Dived into resume, discussion on college Major projects, I have used Dijikstra in one of my project, had a discussion regarding the same.

Third Round - [Technical]

• Java fundamentals, Upcasting, downcasting, inhertance and overriding.

• Design a torrent service, end to end. This took majority of the interview time. We had a great and exhaustive discussion on this.

  • List down all the features.
  • Seeders, Leachers, Centralized meta store.
  • Chunking of data.
  • Piracy Control. Possible? Challenges.
  • Handling Pause, Resume.
  • Can you do it without centralized meta store? [Couldn't answer this one]

• List down all the APIs for Bigbasket.

  • Product, Variant, Details, & Query for UI
  • User Details Management - Login, Signup, UpdateDetails, ForgotPassword.
  • Cart, add, remove.
  • Order
  • Payment

Next we had a round with HR on discussion on salary expectations, etc.
Got confirmation a week later.
Thanks :)