I Cleared the OA and First DSA Round, But Couldn't Crack DP World's Final Round

Three rounds, multiple DSA problems and a few unexpected twists in the final interview.

My DP World SDE 1 interview journey was a mix of familiar problems and new challenges that pushed me to think beyond standard approaches.

Role: Software Development Engineer 1
Company: DP World

Round 1 - Online Assessment

The first stage was an online assessment. I don't remember the exact questions, but the overall pattern included three sections:

• MCQs: Questions based on REST, HTTP, APIs, databases and related fundamentals.

• DSA: Two coding problems of easy to medium difficulty, similar to LeetCode questions.

• SQL: One SQL-based problem.

I was able to clear the assessment and move to the technical interview.

Round 2 - DSA Interview (60 Minutes)

The discussion in this round revolved around Dynamic Programming.

Question: Longest Common Subsequence

I had practised similar DP problems before, so I started by explaining the recursive approach and then moved towards memoization.

After implementing the memoized solution, I discussed the tabulation approach and explained how the DP table could be used to reconstruct the actual longest common subsequence.

The interviewer also asked about the possibility of optimizing the space complexity. I walked through a few test cases and explained the time and space complexity of the different approaches.

Overall, I felt confident about my approach and was able to explain the optimizations clearly.

Result: Selected for the next round.

Round 3 - DSA Interview (60 Minutes)

This round consisted of two problems involving stacks and arrays.

Problem 1: Next Greater Element

I started by discussing the brute-force approach, where I would traverse the elements to the right of each element to find the nearest greater value.

Then I explained how a monotonic stack could optimize the solution to linear time complexity.

I implemented the optimized approach, discussed the edge cases and walked through a few test cases.

Problem 2: Intersection of Two Sorted Arrays

Since both arrays were sorted, I discussed using two pointers to find the common elements efficiently. I explained how to move the pointers based on the comparison between the current elements and how to handle duplicate values correctly.

The goal was to produce the intersection while maintaining the required order and avoiding unnecessary comparisons.

Unfortunately, I couldn't fully satisfy the interviewer with my overall performance in this round.

Final Result: Not Selected.

Unfortunately, I couldn't fully solve the second problem.

Final Result: Not Selected.

Sharing my experience in the hope that it helps others preparing for SDE 1 interviews.