Fashnear Technologies Private Limited

Role: SDE 1 (Lateral Hiring)

College: Tier 1 college

Interview Date: October 19, 2024

Interview Type: Off-Campus (Referral)

Result: Not Specified (Implied no offer, strong DSA but no feedback on System Design)

Difficulty: Medium-Hard

Rounds: 3 rounds

Topics Asked: Data Structures, Algorithms (divide operation, priority queue, heap, heap sort, heapify), System Design (Poll API, Inventory Management with concurrency, Game player allotment/leaderboard), HR questions, Projects.

Experience:

The candidate applied through a referral for an SDE 1 Lateral Hiring position.

Round 1: HackerRank OA

This round consisted of 3 questions with a 90-minute time limit, rated medium-hard difficulty. The candidate successfully solved all questions. Specific questions included: "Minimum Number of Taps to Open to Water a Garden" (LeetCode hard) and "implementation of heap (theoretical), heap sort, and heapify." The candidate was also asked if an element could be removed from a heap in log(n) time, suggesting BSTs are better for this.

Round 2: DSA Interview

The interviewer expected complete and runnable code. The candidate was able to solve all problems presented. One question involved "an array and asked to use some divide operation (always divide by 2^i) to reach the minimum sum." The approach used brute force and a priority queue.

Round 3: System Design / HR

This round involved basic HR questions and a discussion of projects from the current company, followed by two design problems. The first design problem: "Implement a system where the inventory is limited, and we need to prevent users from checking out if the stock is too low. For example, if only 5 items are left and 1000 people try to check out, 995 transactions should fail, and only 5 should succeed." The candidate discussed row locking and other concurrency methods. The second design problem was: "Design of game player allotment, where on a leaderboard, if a player joins, we need to assign them a random player with almost the same rating, then update their rating on the leaderboard." The candidate suggested an approach using hashing buckets. The interviewer did not provide hints but seemed satisfied.