Navi

Role: SDE-1

College: Tier-1 College (Final year UG CS student)

Interview Date: November 2021

Interview Type: On-Campus

Result: Accepted

Difficulty: Easy-Medium

Rounds: 3 rounds

Topics Asked: Aptitude, Maths, Data Structures, Algorithms, DBMS, OOP, Projects, Internships, System Design

Experience:

This SDE-1 interview process at Navi, for a final year UG CS student from a Tier-1 college, concluded with an acceptance.

Round 1: Online Test. The online test lasted 2 hours and consisted of 48 questions. It included Aptitude (20 questions on topics like profit/loss, mixtures, ratios, series completion) and Maths and Aptitude (25 questions of similar difficulty). These first two sections had a combined time limit of 40 minutes for 45 questions. The coding section had two levels: Coding Level A (50 minutes, 2 easy questions, one with tricky implementation) and Coding Level B (30 minutes, 1 easy-medium DP question: "Given some numbers. Choose exactly k pairs and find the maximum abs of difference of the two numbers in every pair. N~ 10^3 afair"). Time was very limited for aptitude/maths questions.

Round 2: Problem Solving and Data Structures. Around 20 students were shortlisted for this 45-minute round. The interviewer was friendly. Questions started with favorite data structures, then moved to trees, asking about complete, full, and perfect binary trees. The candidate struggled initially but explained what they remembered. A tree was drawn on Google Docs, and a problem was given. Another question was "Add 2 LL representing numbers." There was also a discussion on sorting algorithms (merge and quick sort on arrays and linked lists), their time and space complexities. The candidate mentioned a "very big blunder" in coding one problem but managed to remove a bug with extra time. DBMS knowledge was tested, including Oracle, SQL, NoSQL differences, Normalization (NFs), and De-normalization. The interviewer also asked about previous projects and internship work. Some students in this round were asked about multi-level caching, B/B+ trees, designing Google Forms, Twitter ER Diagram, sharding, and how search works in SQL.

Round 3: Hiring Manager / Technical. The interview focused on the resume. The interviewer asked about the comfortable coding language (C++) and the reason for choosing it. OOPs concepts like overloading and overriding were discussed with examples. No system design question was asked, which the candidate considered "little luckier".