ServiceNow

Role: Associate Software Engineer (ASE)

College: BITS Pilani

Interview Date: September (Coding Round: 27th Sept, Technical Rounds: 2nd Oct)

Interview Type: On-Campus

Result: Selected (Implied, as the experience details all rounds through to the hiring manager)

Difficulty: Easy-Medium to Medium/Tricky

Rounds: 4 rounds

Topics Asked: DBMS, Java, OS, Computer Network, Data Structures, Algorithms, Projects, Graph, Binary Tree, Object-Oriented Programming (OOPs)

Experience:

ServiceNow visited BITS Pilani for the Associate Software Engineer (ASE) position. The process included an online coding round followed by three technical interviews.

Coding Round (27th Sept): Held on HackerRank, this round consisted of 15 MCQs on DBMS, Java, OS, and Computer Networks (easy-medium difficulty), and one coding question. The coding question was "Aggressive Cows" (language was different but boiled down to the same problem). Around 30 students were selected for interviews after this round.

Technical Round 1 (2nd Oct): The interview began with a "tell me about yourself" question and discussions on projects, particularly a research project that caught the interviewer's attention. This discussion lasted about 10 minutes. Following this, two easy-medium difficulty Data Structures & Algorithm questions were asked. The first question was "Key Pair," for which the candidate presented four approaches from O(N^2) brute-force to O(N) using an unordered map. The second question was to design a data structure capable of performing `add()`, `remove()`, and `calculate_product()` in O(1) time, with attention to edge cases involving zeros. Around 23 students proceeded to the next round.

Technical Round 2 (Same day as TR1): The interviewer was friendly and energetic, directly starting with coding questions of medium difficulty. A warm-up question asked for the length of the common prefix substring of two given strings. The first main question was an extension of this: given two strings, return the length of the longest common substring. The second question was described as a bit tricky and difficult. 17 students were selected for the final round.

Hiring Manager Round + Technical Round (Same day as TR1 & TR2): The interviewer introduced himself and then asked the candidate to do the same. A brief discussion on projects followed, with the interviewer asking about the project where the candidate faced the most difficulty. After the discussion, a graph question was posed: given a binary tree, perform an invert operation on every edge, changing parent to child and vice-versa.