I recently interviewed for an SDE II position at JPMorgan Chase and wanted to share my experience. Before attending the interview, I searched for a detailed interview-experience blog for this role but could not find one that covered the process thoroughly. I hope this helps other candidates preparing for a similar opportunity.
The interview process consisted of four main rounds. The interviewers were VPs and Senior VPs at the company. One helpful aspect was that I knew who would be interviewing me beforehand. This allowed me to review their professional backgrounds and prepare for topics related to their areas of experience. However, the actual questions were still interesting and sometimes unexpected.
Round 1: Hiring Manager
Major topics: Python, System Design, and Data Structures and Algorithms
The interviewer focused primarily on system design.
He first asked me to choose an application I had previously worked on, design it, and explain its architecture from end to end. Since I had a strong understanding of the product I had developed, I was able to answer the follow-up questions comfortably.
He then gave me a database table containing two columns:
user_id
region
The table contained more than one million records, and I was asked how I would optimize a query that searches for a particular entry.
This led to a detailed discussion about:
Database indexing
Table partitioning
Sharding
Replication
Trade-offs among these approaches
After the system-design discussion, the interviewer moved to Python fundamentals. The questions included:
Multithreading vs multiprocessing
Differences between PUT, POST, and PATCH methods
How garbage collection works
How Python handles garbage collection
Deadlocks
Other basic Python concepts
Finally, I was asked to explain the logic behind Kadane's algorithm.
Overall difficulty: Easy to medium
Round 2: VP Round
Major topics: Python, DSA, and managerial questions
The technical questions in this round included:
Parallelism versus concurrency
A real-world use case for a stack
Mutable and immutable data types
Two logical puzzles
The discussion about the real-world usage of a stack lasted nearly ten minutes, with multiple follow-up questions.
The interviewer also asked some managerial and career-related questions:
Why do you want to switch company?
Have you discussed your decision with your current manager?
This round evaluated both technical fundamentals and the reasoning behind my career move.
Round 3: Senior VP Round
Major topics: Personal projects, resume deep dive, AI/ML, RAG, and security
This round focused heavily on the projects and work experience mentioned in my resume.
The interviewer asked the following questions:
What is the difference between a skill and an agent?
What are LangChain and LangGraph?
How does a RAG architecture work? Explain it in depth.
How would you send a large file to another endpoint?
What are the different types of embeddings?
How would you perform chunking?
How are chunks stored in a database?
What preprocessing steps are used for images and text?
What is the difference between accuracy, precision, and recall?
What is the difference between authentication and authorization?
Can roles be created to restrict users from performing certain actions using tokens?
How does token-based authorization work?
What does the architecture of a token-based authorization system look like?
How does retrieval happen from the database in a RAG architecture?
Most of this round was driven by my resume. The interviewer went deeply into my projects and professional experience rather than asking only surface-level questions.
Round 4: VP Round
Major topics: DSA, System Design, Python, Kubernetes, and work experience
The questions included:
Can a list be stored inside a tuple?
How does memory cleanup work?
Explain the CAP theorem.
How does scaling work in Kubernetes?
Solve a problem involving the K largest integers.
Explain how the elements are arranged at each step of the solution.
Explain the logic behind merge sort.
The interviewer also asked several follow-up questions about my work experience and the systems I had developed.
After completing this round, I had an additional 15min call with an ED.
