Company: Salesforce
Role: Senior Member of Technical Staff (SMTS)
Experience: ~5 YOE
Location: India
Process: OA + Technical Round + In-person Drive
Overall process: 4 rounds after the OA / initial technical screening, with the final in-person drive consisting of DSA, Design and HM rounds.
Online Assessment / Initial Technical Round
The initial technical round was 60 minutes and consisted of DSA
Coding Question 1 — Minimum Window
Given a string consisting of n words and an array of k required words, return the minimum contiguous sequence of words containing all the required words.
The matching condition was all-or-none:
• If all required words are present → return the minimum window.
• If even one required word is missing → return an empty string.
This required identifying a sliding-window pattern.
Coding Question 2 — Permutations
Given a word containing unique characters, return a list containing all possible permutations of those characters.
This was a straightforward backtracking problem.
In-Person Drive
The in-person drive consisted of three elimination rounds:
1. DSA
2. Design
3. Hiring Manager
Round 1 — DSA + Behavioral
**DSA Question 1 — Ball Collision
Given a sequence of incoming balls, where each ball has:
• direction: +1 or -1
• strength
Two balls collide when:
one is moving right (+1)
and
the other is moving left (-1)
When they collide:
• the ball with greater strength survives
• if both have the same strength, both are destroyed
Return the indexes of the balls that remain after all possible collisions.
This was essentially a stack/simulation problem, but the problem was presented as a real-world scenario rather than explicitly identifying the pattern.
DSA Question 2 — Peaks / Climbing Kit / Helicopter
Given an array representing the heights of consecutive peaks, determine the maximum-indexed peak that can be reached.
To move from peak i to i+1:
• If the next peak is higher, the positive height difference requires climbing-kit resources.
• If the next peak is lower or equal, there is no climbing cost.
• A helicopter can be used subject to a given limit and can cover an arbitrary height difference.
The objective was to determine the furthest peak reachable under the available resources.
This was an optimization/resource-allocation problem requiring identification of the appropriate algorithmic approach.
Behavioral Questions
Two behavioral questions were also asked during the DSA round.
One focused on:
How do you decide between the trade-offs of two different approaches for a project?
The emphasis was on engineering judgment and explaining how I evaluate competing technical approaches.
Round 2 — LLD / Design
Elevator System
Design an elevator system.
The discussion covered:
• identifying the major objects/classes
• responsibilities of the objects
• elevator state
• handling elevator requests
• assigning an elevator to a request
• the algorithm for selecting an elevator
• minimizing customer wait time
The interviewer went beyond simply designing the classes and discussed the algorithm used by the elevator controller/scheduler to decide which elevator should service a request.
So the round was a combination of:
LLD + object modelling + scheduling/algorithmic reasoning.
Round 3 — Hiring Manager
The HM round focused heavily on my current project and actual contribution.
Topics discussed included:
Current Work
• Current project
• My specific contribution
• Problems I worked on
• Technical ownership
Architecture
• Current system architecture
• Why the architecture was designed that way
• Technical decisions
• Trade-offs
• Defending the architecture
• What I would do differently if I were redesigning it
Leadership / Behavioral
• How I deal with conflict
• Demonstrating leadership
• Mentoring others
• Strengths
• Weaknesses
The HM discussion was fairly deep and focused more on ownership, technical judgment and leadership than on generic behavioral questions.