SDE2
Interview Date
February 2022
Result
Rejected
Difficulty
—
Rounds
4 rounds (HR, Director of Engineering, Technical, Coding & System Design)
Drive Type
Full-Time
Topics asked
Detailed experience
College: ASU (pursuing Masters in Software Engineering)
Interview Date: February 2022
Interview Type: Full-Time
Result: Rejected
Difficulty: Not Specified
Rounds: 4 rounds (HR, Director of Engineering, Technical, Coding & System Design)
Topics Asked: Resume, salary, background, tech stack, Projects, Data Structures (Stack from scratch, Hashmap from scratch), Algorithms (Substring occurrence), System Design (Reliable, Auditable, Multi-Distribution, Secure event handling system), Distributed services, Kafka, Zookeeper, SQL, NoSQL DBs
The candidate, with 5 years of experience and pursuing a Master's in Software Engineering at ASU, interviewed for an SDE2 role in February 2022.
Round 1 was an HR Interview, which generally covered the resume, salary expectations, background experience, location, sponsorship, and known tech stack.
Round 2 was a 1-hour interview with the Director of Engineering. It involved questions about projects and a coding challenge: "Create a stack data structure from scratch without using any collection classes (push, pop, unlimited size)." The candidate successfully completed this.
Round 3 was another technical round, which included a coding question: "Find the number of occurrences of string s2 in string s1, where letters of s1 do not need to be consecutive." The candidate solved this using backtracking. Another question involved implementing a Hashmap from scratch, including `get`, `put`, `delete`, a hash function, and collision resolution. The candidate completed this using a LinkedList for collision resolution.
Round 4 consisted of a coding and system design round within one hour. The system design problem required designing an event handling system that incorporated reliability (no lost events), auditability (7-year historical record), multi-distribution (forwarding to multiple consumers via push or pull), and security (authorized producers/consumers). Any tools/technologies were available, and a whiteboard could be used for diagrams. The candidate's experience included distributed services, Kafka, Zookeeper, and both SQL and NoSQL databases.