Round 1 (DSA + Resume Deep Dive)
This round was focused on DSA and resume-based questions.
Coding problems asked:
Climbing Stairs → I solved this starting from the brute force approach and then optimized it to the most efficient solution within 10 minutes.
Min Stack → Again, I explained from brute force to the optimal design.
After that, the interviewer grilled me on my resume, but I was confident and answered well.
The interviewer seemed satisfied with both my problem-solving approach and resume discussion.
Round 2 (Project + DSA)
This round was quite chill. The interviewer was very experienced and first discussed my current project and daily responsibilities.
Then he moved to DSA problems:
A pattern printing problem which I solved correctly.
A Binary Tree problem, for which I explained my approach and pseudo-code (due to time constraints) and he was satisfied.
Overall, it was a good interactive round.
Round 3 (In-Person, Resume + Problem Solving)
This was the final in-person round. Unfortunately, this round wasn’t a good experience.
The interviewer started with a very detailed resume grilling, which was fine, but then moved to irrelevant tricky code snippet output questions that didn’t make much sense and felt disconnected from an SDE-2 role.
I couldn’t answer some of those properly.
Later, he asked:
A few problem-solving questions (answered correctly).
How HashMap works internally (answered partially).
To implement Trie, which I did and explained thoroughly.
Despite this, I felt he wasn’t satisfied with my performance.
Finally, HR informed me that my application was put on hold while they “discuss with the team.”
Overall Experience
Round 1 & Round 2 were smooth, fair, and engaging.
Round 3, however, ruined the overall experience. I was expecting HLD/LLD discussions at this level, but instead, I faced irrelevant tricky snippet-based questions that didn’t add much value and left me with a negative impression.
Overall, the interview experience was not good, mainly due to how the last round was conducted.