Education: B.Tech in CS
Date of joining: January 2026
Company: Acko
Title/Level: Software Development Engineer 1
Location: Bangalore, India
Base Salary: INR 18.0 Lakhs
Other Details: On-Campus, offline interviews.
So the hiring process started with a Pre Placement talk followed by an Online Assignment and 2 rounds of technical interviews. I will break them down as much as I can step by step.
PPT : So the PPT happened in the evening almost at 5:30pm on a rainy day and it went on for a solid 1 hr.
OA : After the PPT we were sent to our labs for online assessment which was a coding round and it was conducted on Smart-Browser which they instructed us prior to install.
The OA consisted 3 questions out of which I can rate them to be 1 Leetcode easy, 1 leetcode difficult medium and the last to be a leetcode hard. The duration of the OA was 90 mins.
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The first question I got was a stack question which was to maximise the score that we can recieve by removing a certain substring from a given word multiple times. I can rate this question to be an easy one because I wrote a single function and reused it 2 times to get the correct answer.
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The second question was a DSU graph question in which you will be given a vector of strings and you need to return if you can make a loop by taking the first and last letters of a word and connect them with directed edges if the last letter of 1 word is first of others. I can rate this to be a difficult medium question because the idea of indegree and outdegree in DSU to identify a loop comes from practice.
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Give an array of integers zero values are missing numbers and we have replace with any integer from 1 to m such that any two consecutive numbers must differ by at most 1. Use mod = 1e9+7. Now I admit 1 thing here that this question is indeed a really difficult one. I was only able to complete this because I have seen this question previously in one of my previous OAs. It took most of the time in my OA but finally I was able to pass all the testcases they provided.
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Within a few hours we got the shortlisted candidates 13 students were shortlisted for interviews and I think the factors they considered were OA + CGPA + Resume.
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I had my first interview the next day morning pre lunch.
Interview Round 1: I was called by the placement team and adviced to carry my laptop and phone with me incase of discussion about projects. As soon as I stepped in I greeted the interviewer and we started with each of our introductions. 1 thing I am really thankful about the whole experience is that the interviewers and the whole team who visited our campus were really really chill and student friendly.
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After my introduction, the interviewer seemed to be quite interested in my project. (I have Integrated an ML model into a web application that is useful for teachers of our campus, it had FAISS database, BERT embeddings, Fast API, NextJS and MongoDb as key technologies) We had a fruitful discussion and demo for about 25 mins and I think this was a really good start for an interview.
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The next part was DSA where I was asked a Dp question similar to
https://leetcode.com/problems/unique-paths-ii/description/
but there was a lil twist from this question, his problem statement was that there are coins present on tiles as well as obstacles. I need to go from top-left to right-bottom and then return to the same point as started and maximize the number of coins collected. More than the code part, he was concentrated on my thinking and approach to the problem. -
The next question was a standard question:
https://leetcode.com/problems/majority-element/description/
These two questions almost took 40 mins of time and he was more focussed on how my thinking was and the tradeoffs I explained him. -
The next segment was core subject questions ranging from DBMS, Distributed systems, OOPS concepts (More focus here), Development architectures, ACID properties etc... I think this was the major segment was the actual game changer. I was asked 10-12 questions related to topics like indexing, scaling, sharding, CAP theorem etc...
We ended the interview after 1hr 25 mins and I was confident after the last segment of subject questions. Within a few minutes HR has told me I'll be having a hiring manager round after lunch.
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I had the next round around 3:30 PM and the round was again offline and technical round.
Interview Round 2: I entered the room and we jumped straight into questions.
- I was first asked to explain about the questions I solved in the OA and he asked me about the DSU question I mentioned earlier.
- Then there was a problem statement of a 1D Dp question. I was asked to code it up and dry run a few cases. Which I did and he was satisfied with the coding part.
- Later were a few HR questions and he asked me which was my favourite subject to which I replied OOPS and we had a healthy discussion of real life use cases of OOPS.
- Overall it was a good discussion and asked me to wait for a while for the results.
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1 hour later I was contacted by the placement team with the result and I was so happy to find out that I was finally selected. The only thing I would like to mention for any new students preparing for interviews is that, never neglet the core subjects because they might play a really good role in your interviews.