I got interviewed at PICE (a bengaluru based fin-tech startup). There were currently only 13 members in the engineering team.
I got informed there would be 4 rounds - DSA, LLD, HR, CTO.
Round 1 (DSA)
He was the founding member of PICE. We discussed about my experience, my personal and professional projects. Then we went into DSA. He asked me 2 questions:
- Given a nested array, we needed to flatten it
- https://leetcode.com/problems/longest-substring-without-repeating-characters/description/
The first question I guess can't be done in C++ because of the way input was. I just wrote a pseudo code and explained my approach.
Round 2 (LLD/Database)
He was the team lead. He asked my a LLD for snake-ladder game.
I wrote the pseudo code for it. Listing the classes, methods, basic implementation and algorithms.
Then he asked me to design the database for cricbuzz like system.
I wrote the databse schema, foreign and primary keys.
After I was done, he asked me how would I handle real time stats like strike rate. I told him we can cache the data and whenever user requests, we will serve it from cache and we will be doing the bulk update in the db after an over.
This way we can reduce the load over the database. He just said it's an interesting solution, didn't further asked my clarifications.
Result
Next day, I asked the HR, she sent me a rejection mail. I mailed them about my feedback but didn't get any. I guess in the last round, he wanted something like Kafka based solution for realtime data analytics.