Status: 17+ YOE for a DoD contractor. Staff SWE.
Position: Senior MTS
Location: Seattle
Date: Nov 2019
I had been leetcoding for just a few months. Didn't even know LC existed until June or so. I was referred by a friend in OCI.
Phone Call With Hiring Manager:
Brief phone call about my background, and a description of what his group does, to gauge my interest in going any further.
The following week, I had a phone screen with one of the engineers in the group.
Phone Screen:
- https://leetcode.com/problems/two-sum/
- https://leetcode.com/problems/min-stack/
- Fix string API to make reversing a string faster and/or more efficient. The hint is that it only prints one letter at a time, and there is an API call to reverse the string, or put it back to its original order.
Onsite Interview:
Round 1:
- https://leetcode.com/problems/trapping-rain-water/
- FizzBuzz
Round 2:
- Answered any questions I had.
- Discussion about OCI core values
- A variation of https://leetcode.com/problems/meeting-scheduler/ that returns the total occupancy during the day's timeline as well as conflicts in a schedule.
Round 3: Lunch Interview w/Hiring Manager:
- Answered any questions I had
- Behavioral Question.
- System Design question after lunch: Design a system to handle the next presidential election.
Round 4:
- Given a unique, sorted array, find i such that arr[i] == i.
- https://leetcode.com/problems/binary-tree-level-order-traversal/
Round 5:
- Behavioral questions.
- Josephus's Problem: https://www.***.org/josephus-problem-set-1-a-on-solution/ I heard never heard of this problem. Didn't have much time either. I came up with a solution using a linked list that probably wasn't very efficient. The interviewer said there were bonus points for coming up with the constant time solution, but ran out of time.
This was a great experience, and given that it was the first time I'd interviewed in over 10 years and I haven't had a lot of practice problems under my belt, I'm pleased with how I did and how comfortable I was with the process.
The hiring manager contacted me the following business day, and gave me feedback on what I should work on to get better at interviewing.