Elimination Round
Given an array and an integer k, find the top k most frequent elements.
If two elements have the same frequency, the larger element should appear first.

Questions about Java collections, PriorityQueue, HashMap, etc.

Deep dive into projects mentioned on the resume.

This was followed by 4 loop rounds

Round 1(DSA + HLD)

1)Given a string, split it into exactly three non-empty palindromic substrings.
Initial solution followed by an optimization using Dynamic Programming for palindrome checking.

2)Design a Healthcare Data Ingestion Pipeline capable of processing millions of records efficiently.

Discussion included:

Data ingestion
Queue/message broker selection
Storage strategy
Processing pipeline
Fault tolerance
Scalability
Monitoring and alerting
Handling failed/unprocessed records

Round 2(DSA)

1)Best Time to Buy and Sell Stock.

2)Add one to a number represented as digits.
Constraint: Do not use ArrayList.

There were also several follow-up discussions on optimising the approach and handling edge cases.

Round 3(HM Round)
System Design
Design a Rate Limiter.
Discuss different algorithms, caching ,distributed implementation, scalability, and trade-offs.
Resume Discussion
Detailed discussion on projects.
Questions around architecture decisions, Java internals, and design choices.

Round 4(Behavioural)

Entire round was behavioural, and the interviewer expected answers using the STAR format.

Some questions:

Describe a time when you could not meet a tight deadline.
Tell me about a conflict within your team and how you handled it.
Describe a difficult technical decision you made.
How do you use AI in your daily work?
What is your opinion on AI and how do you think it improves software engineering?

Verdict : Selected