About Me:

Education: B.Tech in Computer Science (Tier-2 College)

Current Role: SDE-1 at a major startup

Experience: 1.2 years of full-time experience

Application:

Recruiter reached out to me on LinkedIn regarding the opportunity.

Round 1 – Machine Coding (90 mins)

Problem: Design a Restaurant Ordering System.

Had to design the complete flow including restaurant, menu, order creation, and order status handling. The focus was on writing clean, modular, and object-oriented code in Java.
The final project had to be submitted as a zip file via Google Form.

Round 2 – Machine Coding Discussion (30 mins)

This round revolved around the code written in the first round.

Explained my design approach, class structure, and relationships between entities.

Follow-up questions based on my code (adding new feature, handling race condition etc) and few questions on SOLID principles & Design Pattern and how they applied to my implementation.

Was able to answer most of the questions, though got a bit stuck on the “adding new feature” part.

Round 3 – Technical Round (PSDS / Data Structures & Algorithms) (60 mins)

Focused purely on problem-solving and thought process, no code implementation required.

1. Insert Delete GetRandom in O(1)

2. Best Meeting Point in a 2D Binary Array

3. Median of Two Sorted Arrays

Discussed approaches, edge cases, and dry runs for all problems. The interviewer seemed quite satisfied with the explanations.

After the Technical Rounds:

I was told that a Hiring Manager round would be scheduled next. After a few days, I followed up with the recruiter and was informed that based on overall feedback (strong in PSDS but not so strong in the Machine Coding round), they decided not to move forward with the process.