Quick Snapshot

Company: Nykaa
Role: SDE-II Android
Experience: 4 years 2 months
Final Result: Offer Received
Compensation: ₹24 LPA (₹22 LPA fixed + ₹2 LPA variable)

There were three rounds in total. The first went deep into Android and Kotlin fundamentals, the second moved towards architecture and Compose, and the last combined mobile system design with projects and behavioral discussion.

Inside the Interview Rounds

Round 1 - Android Fundamentals + AI

We started with MVC vs MVVM, followed by ViewModel internals and the Activity lifecycle.

The interviewer also touched on Kotlin concepts like val vs var, lateinit vs lazy, Singleton and string handling, followed by an API-call implementation using coroutines.

A good part of the discussion went into memory leaks, LeakCanary internals, WeakReference and garbage collection. Towards the end, I was also asked about the AI tools and MCP servers I use while developing.

Round 2 - Architecture + Compose

Here, I had to design an Android screen using MVVM and explain where the API call should happen and why a ViewModel survives configuration changes.

The follow-ups covered Kotlin Flow, StateFlow vs SharedFlow, backpressure, Compose slot table, recomposition and performance optimization.

This round felt less about definitions and more about whether I actually understood what was happening internally.

Round 3 - Mobile Design + Hiring Manager

The final round started with designing cart and filter functionality for a mobile application, including how I would support real-time updates.

After that, we discussed one of my projects in detail, the AI tools I use during development and a few behavioral situations from my previous work.

For anyone preparing for a similar Android interview, I’d suggest going beyond just knowing how to use the framework. Try to understand what is happening internally and why.

I’d especially focus on ViewModel lifecycle, coroutines, Flow, Compose recomposition, and memory management. Along with these, practice explaining your mobile architecture choices, why you chose them. That kind of clarity can really help when the interviewer starts asking deeper follow-up questions.

Outcome

After completing all three rounds, I got the update I was waiting for, I had cleared the process.

The final offer was ₹24 LPA, with ₹22 LPA fixed and ₹2 LPA variable.

My Uber Freight SWE3 interview process was quite structured. Each round focused on a different engineering skill

starting with DSA,

moving into low-level design,

and finally ending with a system-design round.

Experience: More than 4.5 years

Round-by-Round Experience

DSA

I was given an interesting grouping problem involving N riders in a car.

Each rider i was comfortable with a group only when the number of other riders was between L[i] and H[i]. I had to find the maximum number of riders that could be selected while satisfying everyone's condition.

The interviewer expected an O(N) solution, so after discussing the approach, I also had to justify why the complexity stayed linear.

Low-Level Design

The next task was to design a basic file system supporting operations like:

• mkdir - create a directory

• ls - list files and directories

• touch - create a file

• cd - move between directories

• pwd - return the current path

• rm - delete a file or directoryI identified the main entities and explained the directory hierarchy, parent-child relationships and class structure.

There was no requirement to write complete working code, so most of the discussion focused on whether the design was clean and extensible.

System Design

The final prompt was Design a distributed URL shortener.

I started by clarifying the requirements and defining the APIs for creating and redirecting short URLs.

From there, the discussion moved into short-code generation, database choices, caching, collisions, expiration and sharding. The interviewer also asked how I would maintain scalability and availability as traffic increased.

Final Update

All three rounds were done from my side. Overall, I felt the interviews went reasonably well, although there were definitely a few follow-ups where I could have explained my approach better.

I haven't received the final result yet, so I'm still waiting for an update from the team. Will update the post once I hear back.

Company: Adobe
Role: CS1
Location: Bangalore
Final Status: HR Update Pending
My Adobe CS1 hiring drive was a mix of coding, system design, SQL and behavioral discussions.

Round-by-Round Experience

Round 1 - Resume + Cache Design

The conversation started with my resume and projects before moving to a design question:

How would you design a cache?

I discussed the basic architecture, cache behavior. The interviewer also asked follow-ups around how the design would behave under different situations.

Round 2 - Coding + SQL + System Design

This was the most mixed technical round.

First problem was asked Count Collisions, followed by Asteroid Collision as a follow-up.

We then moved into SQL questions and system-design concepts.

One concept the interviewer specifically discussed was idempotency, why it matters and how I would handle repeated requests safely in a system.

Round 3 - Resume + Behavioral

This round related to my resume and previous work.

Along with that, I was asked behavioral questions around my experiences and how I had handled different situations. It felt more conversational than the previous technical round.

Round 4 - Director Round

The final round was with a Director and included a sales-related HLD system-design problem.

I was able to work through roughly half of the design and explain my thought process. The rest of the conversation moved towards behavioral questions and my past experiences.

Final Update

I was still waiting for the HR update, so I didn't have a final selection or rejection to share.

Company: Amazon
Role: SDE-1
Experience: 1 year in DS Intern
Education: B.Tech, IIT
Application: Referral
Final Result: Offer Received

Round-by-Round Experience

Online Assessment

The OA had two coding problems, one medium binary-search problem and another medium-hard DP problem.

After coding, usual work-style and work-simulation assessments.

Round 1 - DSA + Leadership Principles

I first got a variation of Rotten Oranges, which I approached using multi-source BFS. The second problem was Search in Rotated Sorted Array.

The behavioral discussion revolved around handling a tight deadline and an interesting problem I had solved in the past.

Round 2 - DSA + Leadership Principles

The first problem modeled currency conversion as a graph. I initially discussed BFS/DFS, and the conversation later moved towards weighted DSU when multiple queries were involved.

The second problem was Decode String. I needed a few hints before reaching an iterative stack-based solution.

The LP questions focused on ownership and a situation where I had disagreed with my manager.

Round 3 - SDM + AI Fluency

This round was quite interesting because the SDM asked how I use LLMs in my work, how I verify their responses and when I decide whether an AI-generated answer can actually be trusted.

For DSA, I was asked about two knights trying to converge on an infinite chessboard. I used a BFS-based approach, followed by optimization questions.

We also spoke about disagreement and a situation where I had to learn something new.

Round 4 - Bar Raiser

The Bar Raiser was heavily focused on Leadership Principles, with behavioral discussion taking around 40–45 minutes.

The coding problem involved repeatedly transforming a binary string:

0 => 00 and 1 => 10

I had to determine the value at index i after k transformations.

I couldn't reach the optimal solution during the interview, but instead of getting stuck silently, I kept explaining my observations and thought process to the interviewer.

How I Would Prepare

For DSA, I would focus on graphs, BFS/DFS, binary search, DP and stack-based problems, while practicing how to explain and dry-run solutions without IDE support.

I would also take Leadership Principles seriously. Having genuine examples ready around ownership, disagreement, deadlines, learning and impact made those conversations much easier.

For AI-related discussions, knowing buzzwords isn't enough. Be prepared to explain how you use LLMs, validate their output and handle situations where the model can be wrong.

Final Result

Despite not finding the optimal solution in my Bar Raiser coding problem, I eventually received the update that I had cleared the process and received the Amazon SDE-1 offer.

That was probably my biggest takeaway from the experience, you don't necessarily need every round to be perfect. I made mistakes and needed hints at different points, but I kept communicating my approach and stayed consistent across the complete loop, the entire process worth it for me.

Company: Deliveroo
Role: Security Engineering

HR Screen

Short conversation about my current work, previous experience and responsibilities. The recruiter mainly wanted to understand whether my background matched the role.

Technical Round

I was asked:

VP Behavioral Round

Discussion on situations from my actual work. I was asked about a challenging project, a time I helped another team outside my responsibilities, and a conflict with a stakeholder.

Most follow-ups were around what I personally did and how the situation ended.

Update

I hadn't received the final decision.

My Mastercard journey was one of those campus placement processes where every stage tested something different. It was not just about solving DSA questions the process also checked how I communicated in a group, approached open-ended technical problems and explained my past experiences.
Company: Mastercard
Role: SDE-1
Branch: Computer Engineering
Graduation Year: 2027
Mode: Campus Drive
Interview Date: September 9, 2026

Round-by-Round Experience

OA

The HirePro assessment had two DSA questions.

The first was based on Trie, while the second was a constrained BFS problem involving infected elements. I had to find a way to enclose infected elements using minimum walls while keeping the maximum number of elements safe.

The second problem required more careful thinking because of the constraints, but overall the OA was manageable with good DSA practice.

Round 1 (Group Discussion)

There were 11 students in my group, and our topic was:

“Will AI Replace Software Engineers?”

I started the discussion by sharing my perspective on how AI is changing software development rather than simply replacing developers.

I stayed actively involved throughout, listened to other viewpoints and added my points wherever relevant. I also helped keep the discussion on track and got the opportunity to conclude it at the end.

Round 2 - Technical Interview 1

This round started with a discussion about my background before moving into coding.

One interesting question was to compress:

1aaabbcccceeddd => 13a2b4c2e3d
Similar pattern problem:

I first explained my approach and then worked through the implementation. I was also given a stack-based problem and asked to convert a decimal number into binary.

Towards the end, the interviewer asked about my future plans and whether I was considering higher education.

Round 3 - Technical Interview 2

The interviewer first asked me to rate my proficiency in different programming languages, then given a problem about sorting an extremely large file without using extra space.

Then discussed Java equals() vs ==, followed by a system-design question.

Round 4 - HR

The final round was much more conversational, discussed my family background, 10th and 12th marks, previous experiences and hackathons.

There wasn't much technical discussion here.

Final Result

After completing all the rounds, I received the update I had been waiting for, I was selected for the SDE-1 role at Mastercard.

Salary: ₹14 Lakhs per year

This Amazon opportunity started a little differently for me. Instead of applying through the usual careers portal or a referral, I sent a cold email to the hiring manager. That eventually gave me a chance to take the online assessment for an SDE-2 one-year contract role.

Experience: 4 years
Tech Stack: Java Backend

DSA Coding | 40 Minutes

The first problem was based on an inventory allocation system. Each customer had a bid amount and requested quantity. Higher bids received priority, while customers with equal bids had to be served in a round-robin manner.

I had to allocate the available inventory and finally return the customers whose requests were not completely fulfilled.

I understood the approach, but handling equal bids along with the remaining inventory took some time. I couldn't get all the test cases to pass and submitted a partial solution.

Spring Boot Debugging | 60 Minutes

Next, I was given an existing Spring Boot movie API that supported filters such as celebrity, director, rating, popularity and title.

My task was to find the issues in the existing implementation and fix them so that all the provided unit tests passed.

I managed to identify and fix some of the problems, but the different filter combinations and edge cases consumed time. I again ended up submitting with partial test cases passing.

Work Simulation

The technical assessment was followed by a 15-minute work simulation and a 10-minute work-style survey.

These sections focused more on workplace situations, decision-making and how I would approach different scenarios rather than technical knowledge.

I was not selected after the assessment. It was disappointing because I understood a large part of both technical tasks, but this experience also showed me that understanding the approach and completing a working solution within a fixed time are two different things.

If I were attempting the same assessment again, I would focus much more on timed practice and getting every edge case covered before submission.

I got the chance to interview with Deloitte for a Data Analyst role through my college. Since this was a college-level opportunity, most of my interview stayed around fundamentals rather than advanced topics.

Interview started with a few questions from my resume before getting into SQL.

I had to write basic queries and explain how they worked. Some of the topics I faced were SQL joins, WHERE vs HAVING, GROUP BY, aggregate functions and finding the second-highest value from a table.

In one case, the requirement of a query was changed, and I had to modify my existing solution accordingly.

I also received a debugging question where I had to identify the issue in a given piece of code and explain how I would correct it.

After that, I answered a few C++ fundamentals based on concepts I had studied and used during college.

The final part was about my projects. I explained what I had built, what my contribution and why I had selected particular technologies & few follow-ups based on my explanation.

After the interview, I wasn't selected to move forward to the next round. A few of my friends who appeared for the same process were shortlisted for the next stage, but I didn't receive the next-round update.

Sharing my IBM Data Engineer interview experience. My process was fairly short and had two main stages, an online coding assessment followed by a recorded video assessment.

I couldn't make it through the process, but sharing what I faced in case it helps someone preparing for a similar role.

Online Coding Assessment

The process started with an online assessment where I received two coding questions. Both were around easy to medium difficulty. The main challenge wasn't solving something very advanced, but getting the logic right and completing both within the given time.

Similar Problem:

After clearing this stage, I moved to the recorded assessment.

Recorded Video Assessment

This part was quite different because there wasn't an interviewer sitting on the other side.

Questions appeared on the screen, and I had a limited amount of time to prepare and record my response.

Most of them were around my previous experiences and how I handled different situations. Some of the questions were along the lines of:

• Tell us about a challenging situation you faced and how you handled it.

• Describe a project or experience you are proud of.

• What technical skills are you most comfortable with?

• Tell us about a time you had to learn something quickly.

Since the responses were recorded, I had to keep my answers clear and structured without making them sound memorized.

Verdict

I didn't move forward after the recorded video assessment.

Experience: 8+ years

Company: Dezerv

Role: Lead Engineer

Rounds: 4

Round-by-Round Experience

Round 1: DSA

My first problem involved range queries on a binary array. For each query, I had to count the zeroes present between 1s within the specified range.

Instead of scanning the range repeatedly, I used nearest-one information and prefix counts so I could preprocess the array and answer individual queries efficiently.

My second problem was Sort Array By Moving Items to Empty Space. I had to determine the minimum number of moves needed to arrange the items correctly while using the empty position for movement.

I explained my logic, dry-ran it on an example and then implemented the solution.

Round 2: BookMyShow LLD

For my LLD round, I had to design BookMyShow.

I identified entities such as User, Movie, Theatre, Screen, Show, Seat and Booking, and built the booking flow around them.

The more interesting discussion started when I had to handle two users trying to book the same seat at almost the same time. I explained how I would use temporary seat locking, handle payment failures and automatically release a seat when a payment wasn't completed within the allowed time.

Round 3: Uber HLD

My HLD prompt was "Design Uber"

I first narrowed down the scope and then built the design around driver location updates, nearby-driver discovery, ride matching and trip-state management.

As I scaled the system, I discussed database choices, caching and handling a very large volume of location updates.

I was also challenged on failure scenarios. Whenever I introduced another component, I had to explain why I needed it and whether I could achieve the same thing with a simpler design.

Round 4: Senior Engineering Manager

Instead of receiving another standard design problem, I had to choose one of the hardest projects I had worked on and explain it in depth.

I walked through the architecture, production issues, bottlenecks and the decisions I would change if I were designing the same system again.

One part I found particularly interesting was the discussion around infrastructure cost. I had to identify what was costing us the most and explain how I would reduce that cost without compromising reliability or performance.

I was also asked what I expected to break first if the traffic increased significantly and how I would evolve the architecture from there.

Interview Result

I received a rejection after Senior Engineering Manager round, didn't receive detailed feedback, so I can't say what specifically went against me.

A few days back, I got the chance to interview with CloudEagle for a Senior Java Developer role.

Company: CloudEagle

Role: Senior Java Developer

Rounds: 3

Main focus: Java, Spring Boot and Backend Engineering

Final result: Rejected after the final round

Round-by-Round Experience

Round 1: Technical

I began by explaining my current project and responsibilities.

Most of the questions that followed came directly from things I mentioned during that discussion. I was asked about dependency injection in Spring Boot, exception handling, authentication and authorization, design patterns and caching.

One scenario I remember was

If one of my APIs suddenly started taking 4–5 seconds in production, how would I debug it?

I explained how I would narrow down the issue across the application, database and external dependencies instead of immediately assuming where the problem was. Also had a small system-design discussion where I explained how I would separate different application components and place the database and caching layers.

Round 2: Culture Fit

This round was more about my experiences at work. I shared examples of situations where I had taken complete ownership, handled a difficult project problem and dealt with disagreements within my team.

I was also asked:

• why I wanted to switch,

• what kind of work I wanted to take up next and

• what I expected from my next company

Compared with my first round, I found this discussion much more conversational.

Round 3: Engineering Head

My final round again started from my current project, but this time I had to go much deeper into the architecture.

I explained my choices around databases, caching and scaling, along with some production issues I had handled.

At one point, I was asked what I would do if traffic on my current system suddenly increased significantly. I had to identify where I expected the first bottleneck and explain how I would approach scaling from there. I also shared what I knew about CloudEagle and its product.

Interview Result

I felt reasonably good about my first two rounds, but after completing the final discussion, I received a rejection update from CloudEagle, didn't get detailed feedback, so I don't know the exact reason behind the decision.

Role: Full-Stack Engineer

Company: Alpha Law

Experience: 7+ years

Initial Screening Round

The recruiter asked about my current role, previous projects and the kind of full-stack work I had handled, discussed my responsibilities and overall experience.

There wasn't any major coding or system-design discussion in this round.

After the screening, I received the take-home assignment.

Take-Home Assignment - Google Workspace Assistant

The assignment was to build a chat-based assistant integrated with Google Workspace, idea was that instead of manually moving between different Google applications, a user could interact with the assistant through natural-language queries.

The application needed to support actions such as:

• Search through emails.

• Search calendar events.

• Find information from Google Drive.

• Answer questions using retrieved information.

• Send an email on behalf of the user.

• Create or schedule calendar events.

• Perform other supported Workspace actions through the chat interface.

So this wasn't only about building a chatbot UI. I also had to think about authentication, Google APIs, handling different user intents and connecting the frontend with the backend actions.

I completed the assignment and submitted a working version.

Round 2 - Assignment Review and Architecture Discussion

This round went much deeper than I expected.

The interviewer first asked me to walk through the codebase properly, how I had structured different components, how a request travelled through the application and why I had implemented certain parts in a particular way.

Then came the scalability question:

How would you redesign this if we had to support one million users?

Discussed areas such as handling concurrent requests, authentication and user sessions, API rate limits, background processing, caching and separating different responsibilities as the system grew.

This was where I struggled.

While building the assignment, I had relied heavily on AI-assisted/vibe coding to move quickly. The application worked, but during the review I couldn't confidently explain some parts of the generated code or justify why the codebase had been structured that way.

For an experienced engineering role, that gap became very visible once the interviewer started asking deeper follow-ups.

Final Result

I was rejected after the assignment-review round. The useful lesson for me wasn't that using AI tools was necessarily the problem. The problem was submitting code that I didn't understand deeply enough to defend.

I have 7+ years of backend experience, most of my preparation for the Physics Wallah process was around system design and the kind of engineering decisions I had taken in my current and previous projects.

Round-by-Round Experience

Initial Screening: Hiring Manager

My first conversation was with the hiring manager, spent most of the time discussing my current project, responsibilities and the kind of systems I was working on. The HM also explained the role, the team and what they were looking for at the Staff Engineer level.

It was more of an introductory technical discussion before moving into the main interviews.

Round 1: DSA

The coding round had a problem around finding the Longest Increasing Subsequence in an integer array.

I first discussed O(n²) dynamic programming solution, where dp[i] represents the longest increasing subsequence ending at index i.

The interviewer then asked whether I could improve it.

I moved to the O(n log n) approach using binary search, maintaining a structure where each position represents the smallest possible ending value for an increasing subsequence of that length.

There were follow-ups around edge cases, duplicates and the complexity of both approaches.

Round 2: Experimentation and Feature Flag System

This was my first HLD round. The requirement was to design an experimentation/feature-flag platform capable of handling around 2 million requests per minute. Started with how an internal service would determine which experiment or feature variant should be shown to a particular user.

One important part of the discussion was avoiding a network call to the experimentation service for every request.

I proposed providing a client library/SDK to internal services so that most evaluations could happen locally.

For assigning users consistently to variants, we discussed consistent hashing, so the same user would continue seeing the same variant.

Another interesting discussion was around configuration updates. When an experiment or feature flag changed, those updates needed to reach the client libraries quickly. I discussed using a CDC-based propagation mechanism rather than having every client continuously query the database.

From there, we went deeper into caching, failure scenarios, consistency and how the design would behave as traffic increased.

Round 3: E-Book Platform at Large Scale

My next design problem was an e-book platform supporting around 6 million concurrent readers during a major launch.

I had to support browsing, purchasing, free books, previews and protected access to paid content. I discussed the data model, APIs, authorization, preview access, CDN usage and caching strategy.

A major part of my discussion was deciding what I could cache aggressively while still ensuring that users couldn't access protected book content without authorization.

Round 4: Senior VP Discussion

My final conversation was with a Senior VP.

Instead of receiving a fixed design question, I picked one of the most technically challenging projects from my experience and walked through its architecture and key decisions.

I was then given changing scenarios such as:

What would I do if the traffic increased by 10x, and what part of my system would fail first?

I explained how I would identify bottlenecks across databases, networking and caching before deciding where additional infrastructure was actually required.

Interview Result

After a week of the process , I received a mail , selected for the Staff Backend Engineer role.

Tips

While DSA is definitely important, I would suggest spending more time on system design, especially for senior-level roles.

In my experience, the interviewers were not satisfied with just a working architecture. They kept changing the scale and constraints to see how I would adapt my design.

So, while preparing, make sure you can explain why your design works, where it might fail as the system grows, and what changes you would make to handle the next level of scale.

Being able to justify your decisions and discuss trade-offs is just as important as designing the system itself.

I recently went through the Apexon Software Engineer interview. Instead of dividing the experience round by round, I am collectively sharing all the questions I was asked throughout the interview process.

Questions Asked

Core Java

• How does HashMap work internally?

• What happens when two keys have the same hash?

• Difference between fail-fast and fail-safe.

• Compile-time vs runtime polymorphism.

• Difference between method overloading and overriding.

• Runnable vs Callable.

Spring Boot and REST APIs

• Explain commonly used Spring Boot annotations.

• How does an API identify incoming data as the request body?

• What is the purpose of @RequestBody?

• Difference between @PostMapping and @PutMapping.

• Explain the Spring Bean lifecycle.

• What are the different Bean scopes?

Database

• How would you optimize a slow database query?

• What is indexing and how does it improve performance?

• Can adding too many indexes affect performance?

DSA

I was also asked Move Zeroes to the End of an Array.

For example: [0, 1, 0, 3, 12] => [1, 3, 12, 0, 0]

I solved it using a two-pointer approach in O(n) time and O(1) extra space, while maintaining the relative order of non-zero elements.

I finally got the chance to go through the Amazon SDE-1 New Grad loop for AWS. There were four rounds, and each one felt quite different, heavily focused on coding and design, while others were more about my past experiences and how I handled different situations.
Role: SDE-1 New Grad, AWS
Experience: New Graduate, Fresher
Rounds: 4
Result: Offer received

Round-by-Round Experience

Round 1: DSA and Leadership Principles

I first discussed a situation where I faced a blocker while working on something important, how I handled it and what I would change if I faced it again.

For DSA, I received Path Sum II. I had to find all root-to-leaf paths in a binary tree whose sum matched a given target.

I solved it using DFS and backtracking, keeping track of my current path and remaining target.

After solving the standard version, I received a harder variation. I couldn't identify the complete approach immediately, but after a couple of hints, I was able to work through it.
Similar Problem:

Round 2: Low-Level Design

My behavioral discussion here was around a time when I took ownership of something outside my original responsibilities.

For LLD, I had to Design a billing service for a single AWS customer.

Given a customer's usage across AWS services and their respective rates, I needed to calculate the final bill, I modeled concepts such as customer, service usage, pricing and billing, and then explained how I would connect them.

As the requirements changed, I had to adjust my design and justify the classes and abstractions I had chosen.

Round 3: GenAI, DSA and Hiring Manager Discussion

Started this round with a discussion around GenAI and its practical applications before moving to coding.

My first problem was First Non-Repeating Character.

Similar Problem:

The second problem was a variation of Maximum Product Subarray. Along with finding the maximum product, also had to return the start and end indices of that subarray.

Because negative values could turn a minimum product into a maximum, I maintained both the maximum and minimum product ending at each position. I also tracked their starting indices so I could return the correct range.

I then handled follow-ups involving zeros, multiple negative numbers and single-element arrays.

The rest of my discussion focused on decisions and situations from my previous experiences.

Round 4: Bar Raiser

My Bar Raiser was entirely behavioral, with no coding question.

I discussed situations involving ownership, disagreements, failures, difficult decisions and lessons I had learned.

Most of the depth came from follow-ups. I had to explain why I made a particular decision, alternatives I considered, what my personal contribution was, the impact I created.

I made sure my answers focused on my own actions and decisions, rather than speaking generally about what my team had done.

Result

After completing the full loop and waiting for the final update, I received the Amazon SDE-1 New Grad offer for AWS in Seattle.

Preparing DSA alone wouldn't have been enough for this process. I had to be equally comfortable with Leadership Principles, communicating my thought process, adapting to follow-ups and explaining why I made specific technical decision.

I recently cleared an interview for a Java Intern role in Pune. Due to privacy reasons, I won't be sharing the company name but I wanted to share the complete process because the rounds covered a good mix of debugging, Core Java, OOP, SQL, projects and basic DSA.

The internship is for 6 months with a stipend of ₹20,000 per month.

Round-by-Round Experience

Round 1: Debugging Round

My first round was quite different from a regular coding test.

I received six number-pattern programs with incorrect code. Instead of writing everything from scratch, I had to understand the expected output, locate the bugs and correct the existing code.

For me, this round was mainly about code reading, debugging and finding mistakes quickly.

Round 2: Core Java, OOP and SQL

In this round, I was tested on Core Java and OOP, with plenty of how-and-why follow-ups.

I discussed the four pillars of OOP, overloading vs overriding, abstract class vs interface, == vs equals(), exception handling and Java Collections.

For SQL, I had to write queries and then modify them when the requirements changed. I worked with joins, GROUP BY, aggregate functions and basic database concepts.

I also explained the projects mentioned on my resume and what I had personally contributed to them.

Round 3: Project Deep Dive and DSA

This was the most detailed technical discussion for me.

I explained one of my projects from end to end, including the technologies I used, why I chose them, the application flow and my database structure.

I also answered follow-ups about tables, primary and foreign keys, entity relationships and implementation choices.

After that, I received two coding tasks.

First, I had to implement a linked list from scratch, including node creation and traversal.

My second problem was Merge Sort. I explained the divide-and-conquer approach, recursive sorting and the merging process, along with its O(n log n) time complexity.

Round 4: HR Discussion

My final round was more conversational, talked about my background, communication, career plans and why I wanted to start my career in Java/backend development.

I also answered questions about how I learn new things, work with others and what I expected from the internship.

Interview Result

Selected for the Java Intern role in Pune. I received a 6-month internship with a stipend of ₹20,000 per month.

For me, the biggest learning from this process was that I couldn't rely only on DSA preparation. I also needed to be comfortable debugging existing code, explaining Java concepts clearly, adapting SQL queries and defending the decisions I made in my projects.

Preparation Tips

Based on my experience, I would focus on Core Java, OOP and SQL fundamentals first. I would also practise debugging existing programs, revise basic DSA implementations and make sure I could explain every important part of my projects without depending on memorized answers.

I recently went through the SquadStack.ai Core Engineer on-campus hiring process.

Four stages, each one tested something different from aptitude and DSA to CS fundamentals, system thinking and behavioral discussions.

I cleared all four stages and was selected for the Winter Internship + FTE opportunity.

Round-by-Round Experience

Round 1: Online Assessment

My first stage was an OA covering logical reasoning, quantitative aptitude and basic CS fundamentals, along with two coding problems and one SQL question.

For the first coding problem, I had to find the minimum-length contiguous subarray whose sum was at least a given target. I initially thought about checking different subarrays, but since all values were positive, I used a sliding-window approach.

The second problem was Longest Increasing Subsequence. I first discussed the O(n²) DP solution and then explained how I could optimize it to O(n log n) using binary search.

For SQL, I had to combine multiple tables using a JOIN, group the records and apply an aggregate condition.

Round 2: Technical Interview

After clearing the OA, I had my main technical round.

I was asked questions from Operating Systems, DBMS, Computer Networks and OOP. Some of the topics I discussed were processes vs threads, deadlocks, database indexes, TCP vs UDP, abstraction vs encapsulation, and method overloading vs overriding.

I also solved two DSA problems.

The first was Longest Consecutive Sequence. I started with sorting and then improved my solution to O(n) using a HashSet.

The second was Merge K Sorted Linked Lists. I used a min-heap to keep track of the smallest available node from each list.

After explaining my solutions, I also discussed their time complexity and how they would behave for larger inputs.

Round 3: System Discussion

My third round was more focused on system-level thinking.

I don't remember the exact design question clearly. What I do remember is that I had to understand the requirements, break the problem into smaller components and explain how those components would interact.

Round 4: Culture Fit and HR

My final round was much more conversational.

I talked about my projects, technical challenges I had faced and situations where I had disagreements while working with others.

I was also asked about a project I was proud of, what I expected from my first full-time engineering role, why I wanted to join SquadStack.ai, and where I wanted to grow over the next few years.

Interview Result

After completing all stages, I received the confirmation that I had been selected for the Winter Internship + FTE opportunity.

For me, DSA preparation was definitely useful, especially patterns like sliding window, hashing, DP, binary search and heaps.

Preparation Tips

Based on my experience, I would suggest revising OS, DBMS, CN and OOP fundamentals along with DSA.

I would also practise SQL joins and aggregation problems and prepare my projects properly not just what I built, but why I made certain technical decisions and what I would change if the requirements were different.

Company: Activision Blizzard
Role: Senior Software Engineer
Interview mode: Microsoft Teams
Final status: Ghosted after the interview

Technical Interview

One question was about where different types of variables are stored in Java. I had to explain the difference between local variables, object-related data and static members, which naturally led to a discussion around stack and heap memory.

The interviewer continued with Java fundamentals, including:

• Explain stack memory versus heap memory.

• What happens when a new object is created in Java?

• What is the difference between == and equals()?

• Explain method overloading and method overriding.

• How does garbage collection work at a high level?

• What is an immutable object?

The second part moved towards Spring and Spring Boot.

I was asked about dependency injection and why it is useful instead of manually creating dependencies throughout an application.

Some of the discussion included:

• Explain Dependency Injection and Inversion of Control.

• Difference between @Component, @Service and @Repository.

• How does Spring Boot auto-configuration work?

• What happens when an HTTP request reaches a Spring Boot application?

• How would I handle exceptions globally in a REST API?

What Happened After the Interview

After the interview, I didn't receive any further communication from the recruiter or the team. There was no clear rejection or feedback shared with me.

I waited for an update and followed the process for some time, but no response came after that, so I was essentially ghosted.

Company: Cumulations Technologies
Role: Entry-Level Software Engineer
Experience: Fresher
Rounds: 3

Round-by-Round Experience

Round 1: HR Screening

The first conversation was a quick profile check.

I introduced myself, talked about my technical skills and explained one of my projects. The questions were mainly around my preferred programming language, why I was interested in the role and what I expected from my first software engineering job.

After clearing this discussion, I moved to the assessment.

Round 2: Aptitude and Technical Assessment

This round covered several basic areas. The coding problem gave me an unsorted array containing odd and even numbers. I had to move all odd numbers to the left and even numbers to the right.

I started with an extra-space solution and then improved it using two pointers for an in-place approach.

Similar pattern problem:

SQL questions covered JOIN, WHERE and HAVING, while JavaScript included var, let, const and a few output-based questions.

The remaining questions were based on aptitude and logical reasoning.

Round 3: Director/CTO Discussion

The final round focused more on how I think than on writing code.

My projects became the starting point for questions around technical choices, debugging and learning unfamiliar technologies.

I was also asked how I would approach a problem when I didn't immediately know the solution and why I wanted to begin my career with Cumulations Technologies.

Result

I reached the final stage, but I wasn't selected for the role.

With around 6 years of experience in Java backend development, I went into the Tide SDE-3 process expecting the usual mix of coding, system design, and backend questions. The actual interview turned out slightly different.

The process started with a short HR and technical discussion, followed by a practical code-review round. The final round was with the hiring manager and went deep into my project experience and architecture decisions.

Round-by-Round Experience

HR and Initial Technical Round

The first call lasted around 30 minutes.

After a brief discussion about my background, we moved into technical topics.

The interviewer asked about multithreading, event-driven architecture, and end-to-end project delivery. I also explained my responsibilities in previous backend projects and how involved I had been from development to production.

The interviewer then gave me some context about the role and expectations for an SDE-3 engineer.

Code Review Round

This was the most practical round. I was given around 50 lines of an API controller where service calls, database operations, event publishing, and business logic were mixed together.

I had around 40 minutes to review the code and write at least 15 comments covering both major and minor issues.

After that, we had a 20-minute discussion around my observations. For several comments, the interviewer asked why I considered something problematic, what impact it could have in production, and how I would redesign it.

The focus was mainly on code quality, separation of responsibilities, maintainability, and production risks.

Hiring Manager Round

The final round started with a 15-20 minute discussion about one of my projects.

From there, the interviewer kept going deeper into the decisions I had made. If I mentioned a technology, I was asked why we chose it.

The conversation covered:

• Technology and architecture choices

• Alternatives and tradeoffs

• Scalability

• Problems faced during development

• Individual contribution

• Production ownership

This round felt less like a fixed questionnaire and more like a technical conversation.

Interview Result

After completing all three rounds, I received the confirmation that I had cleared the process and received an offer from Tide.

The code-review round stood out for me because it tested something different from regular coding interviews. Overall, the process focused heavily on whether I could reason about backend systems, defend engineering decisions, and understand their impact in production.