Atlan winter Internship

Status: Undergrad
College: Tier 3
Previous Experiences: 9 months. Worked in a good startup and was a mentee in an open source mentorship program.

I applied on 5th October, 2024.

There were 4 rounds:

1. Online Assessment - Recieved the test link on 10th October, Deadline: Midnight, 11th October
2. Take Home assignment - Got the mail on 12th October, intial deadline was 16 October but extended to 18th October. Submitted my solution on 18th October.
3. Technical Round - Interview held on 24th October. After 1 hr, recieved the mail and later a call to schedule the next interview.
4. Cultural Round - Interview held on 29th October. Recieved Rejection mail next morning.

1. Online Assessment (75 min)

LRU Cache Implementation (solved):
The task is to implement an LRU (Least Recently Used) cache with a given capacity. The cache supports two operations: put to insert or update a key-value pair, and get to retrieve a value for a given key. If the cache exceeds its capacity, the least recently used element should be removed. The challenge requires both operations to have O(1) time complexity.

Maximizing Pooled Money with Conflicts (solved):
This problem involves selecting members from a group of 8 to maximize their pooled contributions. However, some members have conflicts (cold wars), meaning if one goes, the other cannot. The task is to find the maximum possible pooled amount by considering valid subsets of members without conflicting pairs.

Entire Problem statement link: https://pastebin.com/Guxav8rk

2. Take Home Assignment

The Assignment included developing a scalable logistics platform that links users and drivers for transporting goods, capable of handling 10,000 requests per second across 50 million users and 100,000 drivers globally. It features user access for booking and tracking, driver job management, and admin oversight of fleet and data. The system must efficiently manage real-time GPS data and vehicle matching. Deliverables include an operational application, architectural and ER diagrams, a system explanation document, and a video demonstration, focusing on scalability, performance, and functionality.

The entire Problem statement link: https://atlanhq.notion.site/Atlan-Engineering-Internship-Task-11c0e027187b80c0b036c90057d6806c

3. Technical Round (45 min)

Questions Asked:

1. Find first duplicate number in an array with minimal index: https://mekicha.github.io/python/algorithm/interview/2021/09/18/first-duplicate.html (solved)
2. Find sum of the digits of a given number (solved)
3. Was asked questions about go programming language (as I worked with it in my previous internships) : why do u like go ? : what are channels ? : what are go routines ? (answered it all)
   If u are experienced in web dev, they are gonna ask about that instead.
4. read a file line by line and suppose there is processLines() function, Take help of go concurrency to make the call asynchronous. I had to code it up in Golang. Saw me struggling on my attempt to code read line by line functionality. i had forgot about bufio package, told me to google it out, after that He simplified the question to apply go concurrency, which I did.
5. Was asked to give a HLD of a checkout functionality in e-commerce platforms.
6. Was asked about CAP theorem, and in a payment service which two characteritics from CAP should u consider. Later asked me about eventual consistency. (the interview seemed satisfied with my response)

Within an hour, got a mail that they want to schedule the next round.

4. Cultural Round (30 min)

Questions Asked:

1. Introduction
2. Tell me about your previous internships
3. Tell me what is the most impactful thing u have done till now, and any failures u had.
4. What was the remote setting experience for u in your previous internship ?
5. What are your thoughts on remote work and difficulties that one might face working remotely and how can one resolve those ?
6. If an extremely tough task arrives at your desk, which u don't know how to approach, how will u go on with it given deadline is near.
7. Where do u keep yourself updated with latest technological trends ? How do u go on with learning a new technology or programming language ? Cite anything u learned recently, and how did u went with it.
8. How will u scale a system for 10000 users.
9. Why do u want to work at atlan ? (I think I messed up in this question, as I told I am exploring various domains in tech like data, testing etc, I should have shown interest in their products and values rather that focusing on my growth.)

Overall, I believed my cultural round went well, but recieved rejection mail next morning.