Company: UBS
Role: (campus / entry-level)
Location: Pune
Experience level: freshers
Result: Selected
Difficulty: Medium (overall pipeline); Coding on HackerRank: Easy → Medium
Flow:
Application → Culture assessment → EON test → HackerRank (10–15 MCQs + 1–2 coding Qs (easy → medium)) → Onsite/Virtual interviews: 2 Technical Rounds (deep resume dive + Java + aptitude + scenario questions) → HR Round (behavioral, fit, relocation).
TRs focus heavily on your resume, projects, basic Java, CS fundamentals, and system/scenario thinking. Expect 1–2 coding questions earlier (HackerRank) and more conversational/problem design questions in TRs. Prepare projects deeply, revise Java basics, practice aptitude, and be ready to design features for common products (video-streaming etc.).
Interview stages (detailed)
Online application
Upload resume, basic details.
Culture assessment (email link)
Personality / situational questions (timed/pre-recorded). Tests cultural fit.
AON test
Short aptitude/style screening (numerical, verbal reasoning). Varies by hiring batch.
HackerRank test (they’ll send a test link)
Format: ~10–15 MCQs + 1 coding question (sometimes 1–2 coding problems).
MCQs: CS fundamentals (OS, CN, DBMS, OOP), basic aptitude, quick logic.
Coding: Easy → Medium (array/string/hashmap/linked list type). Typical online-test difficulty. Time about 60–90 minutes.
Interview loop (if you clear tests)
Technical Round 1 (TR1): Deep dive into resume & projects; easy/medium Java questions; some aptitude/number-series puzzles; scenario/design question (e.g., feature set for a video streaming platform).
Technical Round 2 (TR2): More resume deep-dive + clarifications on earlier answers; follow-up on TR1 questions; additional Java/CS basics + behavioral/technical scenarios.
HR Round: Behavioral: self-intro, risk-taking situation, why UBS, relocation readiness, other offers/applied companies, handling rejection.
Exact question types I faced / reported commonly
HackerRank (online)
10–15 MCQs: OS/CN/DBMS/OOP fundamentals, quick aptitude.
1 coding problem (sometimes 2). Difficulty: Easy → Medium.
Typical tasks: two-sum variants, reverse linked list, frequency counts, prefix-sum subarray problems, merge intervals, simple DP / greedy.
Technical Round — common topics & sample prompts
Resume deep-dive
Why this project? What exactly did you implement? (Be specific: modules, libraries, algos)
How did you evaluate performance? (metrics, datasets, baselines)
Trade-offs you considered, bottlenecks, and how you resolved them
Java / CS basics (easy → medium)
Non-primitive data types in Java — examples and when they are used (String, arrays, Collections: List, Map, Set).
OOP questions (difference between interface and abstract class; method overriding vs overloading).
Thread basics (what is a thread, synchronization primitives).
Collections basics: HashMap vs TreeMap, ArrayList vs LinkedList, complexity reasoning.
Aptitude / puzzles
Number series / pattern questions (small puzzles you solve on the spot).
Logical reasoning (short).
Scenario / system thinking (behavioral technical)
“Design features to make a video streaming platform the best — write all possible features.”
What they expect: think end-to-end: UX features (recommendations, thumbnails, ABR), infra (CDN, load balancing), metrics (latency, rebuffering), personalization, payment/subscriptions, moderation, analytics, offline mode, DRM, autoscaling, AB testing, caching strategies.
“How would you scale X to 1M users?” — talk caching, DB partitioning, load balancers, asynchronous processing.
Behavioral / company fit (in TR & HR)
Why UBS? Have you applied elsewhere? If yes, why were you rejected? Name UBS competitors.
Situational questions: risk taken, conflict resolution, leadership examples.
Relocation readiness and work authorization.
Sample answers / scripts (short)
Preparation checklist (what helped / what to focus on)
Practice HackerRank-style problems — arrays/strings/hashmaps/linkedlists/trees. Target easy → medium. Timebox yourself.
Revise Java basics — collections, OOP, String immutability, non-primitive types, exception handling, a bit of concurrency.
Brush up CS fundamentals — OS (deadlock, paging), CN (TCP vs UDP, three-way handshake), DBMS (ACID, normalization). These show up in MCQs and TRs.
Project deep-dive — be ready to answer design/architecture, choices, tradeoffs, evaluation metrics, and bugs you faced.
Scenario practice — design 2–3 common products (video streaming, messaging app, e-commerce feature) with features, high-level architecture, and scaling plan.
Aptitude drills — short number series and logical puzzles — timed practice.
Mock interviews — practice explaining aloud; TRs are conversational and expect you to think and modify answers live.
