Status: ASDE @ Japanese E-Commerce Giant, 1 YoE
Position: Backend Engineer at CleverTap
Location: Mumbai, India
Date: April, 2021Hiring manager reached out to me via a third-party recruitment agency that shared my profile.
Round 1 (Technical / Phone Screen)
An engineer with 2+ years of experience working at CleverTap connected over Google Meet. The interview went on for 45 minutes. The following are the topics that were discussed.
- Basic intro and discussion my resume
- Questions like, why switching so early with just 1 YoE?
- Discussion of current project and side projects
- Discussion on design patterns I've worked with, if any
- Java Hashmap internals
- Concurrent hashmaps
- Usage of synchronize blocks
- Discuss on DB locking
- Difference between Oracle SQL and MySQL (since I had worked on these)
- High level discussion on scaling an app with MySQL
HR reached out to me next day, and wanted to schedule next round. I delayed it by 2-3 days as I was going out of town.
Round 2 (Onsite)
The interview was conducted by an Engineering Director over Google Meet. Duration of 45-55 minutes. The following topics were discussed:
- Resume skimming, basic intro, etc
- Why want to leave current organisation?
- indepth discussion on Wrapper classes
- Java Object Header concept
- Autoboxing
- Garbage collection algorithms
- Java string immutability
- MongoDB basics
- JSON response codes, status, methods etc
- Binary Tree vs BST (finally one DS Algo question, ROFL)
- Program to invert a Binary Tree (mandatorily in Java language)
HR reached out to me next day, and wanted to schedule next round on the very next day.
Round 3 (Behavioural)
Connected over Google meet for a duration of 30 minutes. Discussions on typical HR questions.
- Why switching?
- One ownership scenario.
- One conflict scenario.
- Feedback your manager has about you.
Finally she discussed about company culture, leave policies, extra leaves due to WFH, etc.
Verdict (Offer)
Got a call on the same day from HR/TA head. They made an offer which was neither too low nor too high. I was not interested to shift to Mumbai, moreover overall I was not excited a lot. The product was interesting with a lot of learning chance but I've been interviewing for many companies lately and have already received a couple of other offers. I was not very interested in this, so had to turn them down without much negotiation.
I have been preparing for FAANGM-level companies and other top Indian startups along with a full time job. All thanks to LC community for the motivation. Hoping to make it to a top company soon. :)
