I applied through Instahyre and got a call from HR, and discussed the job role and basic details. It was a remote opportunity. After the call, she briefed on the interview format and scheduled the interviews one by one. This company's process is a bit slow, so patience is key, and you will most likely hear back.

Interview Process

1. Assignment (20 mins): This assignment helps us understand your math and logic. Since our product is data-heavy, we need to get a sense of your comfort levels.
2. Recruiter call (30 mins): This will be an initial discussion to learn about your background in detail, interests and share about the role. Based on this discussion, we'll move forward with the next step.
3. Technical Discussion (45 mins): This conversation will be scheduled with someone from the Engineering team. During this round, the focus will be on your technical skills, data structures and algorithms.
4. Assignment (3-4 hours): As a part of the next stage of the process, you would be working on a take-home assignment. It won't take you more than 4 hours to complete it, but we will give you about 3 days to work on it. We will reach out to you before scheduling this round.
5. Technical Discussion (2 hours): If you opt for a take-home assignment, we will set up about 2 hours with the team to discuss the assignment with you. Through this discussion, you will get to interact with and know the team, and it will help us understand your thought process and approach
6. Culture fit (30 mins): You'll meet with our founding team. They'd want to understand what drives you. This is also a good opportunity to get the inside scoop on PriceLabs.
7. Reference check and offer.

Round 1 - Prescreening assignment (20 mins)

Gave a pseudocode and asked me to explain what the code does in 2-3 lines, and print its output

Round 2 - Recruiter call (30 mins)

An initial discussion to discuss about background and interests in detail, and a couple of behavioural questions. Also gave a high-level overview of Pricelabs products. She also mentioned the tech stack was Ruby on Rails (Python) backend and ReactJS on the frontend, and whether I was comfortable working in them. It was a good discussion.

Round 3 - Technical Discussion (45 mins)

This round was scheduled with someone from the engineering team. The first 10-15 minutes were basically to get to know each other, and for the next 30-35 minutes, the focus was on 2 DSA problems, 1 easy and 1 medium.

Q1 - Check if two strings are anagrams: https://leetcode.com/problems/valid-anagram/description/
Q2 - Based on Next Greater Element: https://leetcode.com/problems/daily-temperatures/description/

For the 2nd problem, I initially gave an approach iterating from backwards, but he asked me to think/implement iterating forwards. I thought out loud, and also the interviewer was good and helpful, tried understanding my approach and gave hints if I was stuck anywhere. The interview was slow-paced, so there was not much time remaining at the end to fully code the 2nd problem. Overall, I believed that the round went good.

Verdict: Rejected

Surprisingly, after a week I heard back from the HR that they would not be proceeding with my candidature forward with the following feedback, "After careful consideration, we've decided to focus on candidates currently in the advanced stages of the process, whose skills and experiences align more closely with what we need for this role at this time."

Key Takeaways

1. If you already know the optimal solution and the expectation is to write a fully working code, then you should not waste time by giving brute force approach, so that you can save time for coding.
2. Try not to take many hints from the interviewer.
3. Always check for edge cases before finalising your solution.