Status: 3.5 YoE, Tier 1 college India
Position: Senior Software Engineer at a startup Kobo360
Location: Banglore, India

Technical round-1 (1.5 hour):
Interviewer shared coderpad link and two questions were asked,both were coding questions.

• Q1. Given a 2D grid contain coins values, A player can start from top left conrner and should end in right bottom corner, He can move either right or bottom one step at a time. Coin values are non neg, but -1 indicates no way to proceed. Write a program to find max coin can be collected. If no way to reach bottom return -1

Me: Explained the DP approach, to which he agreed and then gave him the working code.

• Q2. A Board(Word) game Given a board, contain letters and a set of valid words are given. Player can move up, down. left, right, all diagonals etc, a cell should not be used twice.

Me: Explained him the DFS + backtrack technique, to which he aggreed and then gave him the code solution.

Technical round-2 (1 hour):
This was kind of design round. The question he asked as follows :

• There are Bidders and Auctioners. Bidders will place bid's and auctioners will auction there items. We need to create a system design to get the top three bidders.

I created the basic LLD of the System, and then used Heaps DS to maintain the top three bidders to which he said that the bids place will always be in increasing order. So I suggested a doubly linked list kind of DS to maintain the list, to which he agreed and then I started coding it.

• Random questions on locking in distributed environment.
  Explained him Pessimistic and optimistic locking accompyning with real world examples.

Technical round-3 (1 hour):
This round was the last round with the Director of Engineering.

• Questions on project and work done.
• Then he asked to code an autocomplete system.
  Me: explained him the Trie approach, why it is efficient in this scenario to which he nodded yes. Then gave him the working code on coderpad link that he shared. He cross tested the code with his test cases and it seems working fine.

I was hopeful that, I might get the offer, since feedback was positive in each round. But after not hearing back from them after couple of days, I called the HR, for getting the results, to which she said we cannot take candidature forward, because there were some technical incompetencies.

I think, I gave my best shot in each round. I cannot remember a single question which was not accepted by the interviwer. Anyways , I'll keep up the hustle and will further improve my coding skills.