Role: Associate
College: Tier-3 college
Interview Date: December 2024
Interview Type: Off-Campus
Result: Not Specified (progressed to Super Day)
Difficulty: Medium
Rounds: 5 rounds
Topics Asked: Data Structures, Algorithms, Java Core, Kafka, OOPs, Java Internals, Low-Level Design, High-Level Design, Computer Networks
Experience:
The candidate, with 2.5+ years of experience as a Software Engineer at a product-based organization, was reached out to by a recruiter on LinkedIn.
- Round 1 (HackerRank Online Assessment): A 90-minute test with two DSA questions (LeetCode Easy and LeetCode Medium). The candidate coded both questions.
- Round 2 (CoderPad Virtual Interview): A 1-hour virtual interview where the interviewer asked two DSA questions, both LeetCode medium level. The candidate solved both. Questions included: "Find First and Last Position of Element in Sorted Array" and another problem solved using a heap.
- Super Day (3 interviews in a single day):
- Round 3 (DSA Round): This was a 1-hour interview. Questions were "Container With Most Water" and a "Take, No Take DP variation." The candidate solved both.
- Round 4 (DSA + JAVA CORE QUESTIONS + Kafka): This round covered various topics including: HashTable vs HashMap vs Concurrent HashMap (tradeoffs and advantages), Concurrency (Optimistic vs Pessimistic), Kafka Internals (Advantages and Disadvantages over RabbitMQ), and finding the longest increasing or decreasing subarray (Easy).
- Round 5 (OOPs + Java Internals + LLD + HLD + CN): The interview was scheduled for 1 hour but extended to 1 hour 30 minutes. It started with OOPs-based questions. The interviewer asked about the whole process of deploying code on the cloud (Java compilation, Maven, JAR vs WAR, JVM vs JDK vs JRE vs JIT, CI/CD pipelines steps). A design question involved implementing an algorithm so that a user wouldn't be able to ask for an OTP for resetting a password more than 3 times in the last 5 minutes (Rate Limiter). Other topics included HTTP vs HTTPS and TCP vs UDP, and an HLD question on implementing the Rate Limiter Algorithm (CDN, Gateway).