About me
- 2019 graduate from an NIT (6 years 9 months experience)
- Currently working as an SSE at a PBC
Interview timeline
- Recruiter reached out via LinkedIn in March 2026 and explained the interview process.
- Total of 4 rounds, with each round being eliminatory. DSA, Design 1, Design 2, HM
Round 1
This round was of 1 hour and took place on 16th March. I was asked two questions.
-
Given a binary matrix where each row is sorted. return the row with the max number of ones.
I first gave the brute-force approach and then gave the binary search based approach. The interviewer pushed for the linear time solution but I was unable to come up with the same. I coded the binary search based solution and it worked fine for all the test cases. -
Minimum platforms required to accommodate all trains
Only algorithm was expected. Since I had solved this problem before, I was able to answer this within 5 minutes.
I then asked a few questions about the company and the interview was over after 45 minutes. The recruiter later called to inform that feedback was positive and scheduled my next round.
Round 2
This was a design round and was taken by an EM at Inito. It was for 90 minutes and took place on 18th March. I was essentially asked to design Google Docs HLD.
Self review : Positive
Round 3
This was again a design round and was taken by a senior EM at Inito. It was for 2 hours and took place on 25th March.
After a brief intro, I was given this problems statement.
Your company is creating a transcription device for meetings. This device would be present in meeting rooms for multiple companies and would give a live transcription of an ongoing meeting. Users should also be able to translate the transcription into whatever language they choose to along with viewing transcriptions of past meetings. Focus was on ensuring high availability, zero data loss, and near realtime transcription.
The interviewer gave a good 30 minutes to come up with the HLD for this. I was able to design a good solution and we then spent a lot of time discussing my approach. The interviewer was very friendly and asked really good counter questions that made me revisit a few minor components in my design.
The focus then moved to LLD of how I would model the data and how I would ensure security and authorization for meetings. Overall, this round went very well.
The recruiter too called later and told the feedback was positive and I would have a final HM round.
Round 4
This round took place on 31st March and was of 1 hour. It was again taken by the same senior EM from round 3. The interviewer discussed my current company's projects and asked a few counter questions from it. He then asked my team structure, followed by a discussion on AI and LLMs and how I keep myself updated with latest developments in tech.
The very next day I got a call from the recruiter that the feedback was positive. But since I don't have lead experience and they were looking for a lead, I would initally be given an SSE role and based on my performance a few months later, I would be moved to lead designation. There would be no change in compensation though because of this downlevel. The offer letter was rolled out on 2nd April.
I had to decline the offer though because of competing offer from Microsoft.
Compensation details
https://leetcode.com/discuss/post/7772042/inito-sse-bangalore-offer-april-2026-by-w60l1/