• Status: Rejected after the final round
• Company: Motive (formerly KeepTruckin)
• Role: SDE 2
• Location: Remote/India

Round 1: Hiring Manager

Verdict: Cleared

The discussion was mostly around my background and technical depth.

• Topics: Introduction, deep dive into past projects, and discussing the most challenging technical problems I’ve solved.
• DSA Question: LC 49 - Group Anagrams. Solved using a Hashmap with sorted strings as keys.

Round 2: Technical / DSA

Verdict: Cleared

Focused on standard matrix and array problems.

• Problem 1: LC 240 - Search a 2D Matrix II. Efficiently searching a row-wise and column-wise sorted matrix ($O(m+n)$ approach).
• Problem 2: LC 525 - Contiguous Array. Finding the maximum length of a contiguous subarray with an equal number of 0s and 1s (Prefix Sum + Hashmap).

Round 3: Technical / DSA

Verdict: Cleared

• Problem 1: LC 267 - Palindrome Permutation II. Generate all palindromic permutations of a string. Used a frequency map and backtracking.
• Problem 2: LC 2134 - Minimum Swaps to Group All 1's Together II. Focused on the sliding window approach for a circular array.

Round 4: Machine Coding

Verdict: Cleared

Task: Design and implement a service with a /get-cars API.

• Requirements: * The service interacts with a public API that returns vehicles for a specific brand and year.
  • Definition of "Deprecated": Any car that has not been released in the last 10 years relative to a given input year.
  • Objective: Design an API that accepts a year and returns all "deprecated" cars from the last decade.
• Discussion Points: Data handling, caching strategies for public API responses, handling rate limits of the external API, and concurrency.

Round 5: High Level Design (HLD)

Verdict: Rejected

Problem: Design TikTok.

• Key areas discussed: * Video Upload/Ingestion pipeline (Transcoding, CDNs).
  • Feed Generation (Push vs. Pull models, ranking algorithms).
  • Handling massive scale and low latency for video streaming.
  • Database sharding and consistency models.

Final Thoughts

The process at Motive is quite thorough, covering everything from basic DSA to practical machine coding. While I cleared the coding and management rounds, the HLD round was the bottleneck.