Pinelabs Interview Experience: SDE: Set 1

Company Name: Pinelabs

Job Role: SDE

Years of Experience Required:  2.5 Years

Drive: Off-Campus (Referral)

Preparation for Pinelabs

Topics: Data Structures and Algorithms

Duration: 1.5 years

Source of Preparation: Codechef,  Leetcode, GFG, Striver’s SDE sheet.

[BONUS]:

Pinelabs Interview Rounds

I had a total of 3 rounds all scheduled for 45 mins, all being virtual as well as eliminatory rounds.

Round 1: 2 DSA questions and a few Java-based questions.

  1. Max contiguous Sum/ Kadane’s Algo
  2. Find 3rd largest number in an array ( no sorting, no extra space shall be used)
  3. Why Java strings are immutable? 
  4. Difference between comparator and comparable. 
  5. Few predict the output kind of questions.
  6. Auto configuration explanation and how to exclude a config class in Spring?

Round 2: This round was based on system design. I was asked to design a Service to shorten a URL. There is a very confined article for this on GFG, you can refer to that for a better understanding. 

Round 3: This round was a techno-managerial round with a very senior person. 

Question: You are a freelancer who does projects for clients and seeks money from them in return. Key points for you are :

  1. At a time you can take one project only. 
  2. Once you take a project you will have to finish it before taking another one. Cant work on 2 projects simultaneously.
  3. Cant work partially.
  4. Irrespective of time and effort you charge an equal amount for all the projects.

Given the start and end times along with the name of the project, you have to extract the biggest subset of the project such that none of them overlap. This question was based on activity selection, and I used the same approach to solve it. Had to write the entire working code and had to demo the output on an online IDE. So make sure you prepare really well and have hands-on writing code. 

Verdict: Selected

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