I recently appeared for DE Shaw MTS Interview and below I am posting my interview experience.
There were total 1 OA and 3 Rounds.
I do not remember the questions I was asked on my OA but There were also MCQ's around CS fundamentals.
Profile :
BTech CS Tier-1 [2023 Graduate]
Work ex : 10 months [Startup]
Below I am posting the questions i was asked in the interview along with my experiences
1st round :
Was scheduled after 3-4 weeks of my OA. The first time, the interviewer didn't show up.
- Design a data structure that supports insert, delete and get_random all in constant time. (code and dry run)
There was a single interviewer.
2nd round
Was scheduled after almost 2 weeks of Round 1
- Given a string consisting of characters 'a', 'b' find the largest substring that is of the form "a(x times)b(y times)a(c times)" where x, y and c could be zero. PS : I don't remember this problem exactly, but this was on the similar lines (did not write full code, but wrote a recursive solution)
- Simple Trie Problem, they wanted to know if was aware of Trie concept, explained that didn't code.
- find the kth largest element in logarithmic time (coded the sorting solution) [the most optimized approach was to have a min heap of fixed size k]
There were 2 interviewers.
3rd round [Hiring Manager] : the toughtest round so far.
scheduled after 1 week of Round 2.
- slight modification of https://leetcode.com/problems/car-fleet/.
Unlike this question I was not given a target distance, instead the end line was inifinity. I was just supposed to find the number of fleets, essentially.
I couldn't figure out this was a monotonic stack question and gave a merge-sort or counting inversions type approach. - given a list of strings, check if there exists a unique superstring.
Here a superstring is basically a string such that all the other strings are subsequence of this string.
I was completely blank and the interviewer helped me out on this. The idea was to model this problem as a graph problem and have a topological sort type of approach to check for uniqueness.
Other questions
These were asked by the Hiring Manager
I had mentioned that in my current org I was working with distributed systems and we heavily used kafka. There were questions arond concurrency and threads and some questions around kafka (only basic questions)
I was asked about Producer Consumer problem, how we can signal from one thread to other. Asked to write how would I implement locks in a producer consumer problem etc.
I had mentioned that in my current company I worked on java, there were questions around why a particular framework was chosen etc.
Also the manager wanted to know why I wanted to switch my current company.
There were 2 interviews one Senior Engineer and the other Manager.
I got the rejection mail 2 weeks after appearing for the Hiring Manager Round.
