ThoughtSpot | Staff Engineer | Bengaluru | Oct 2024 [Result (Decided not to move ahead)]
Round 1: Coding Round
Questions:
- Alien Dictionary (with valid input)
Candidate's Approach
No approach provided.
Interviewer's Feedback
No feedback provided.
Round 2: System Design (LLD)
Questions:
- Design a Sentiment Analysis Service for Product Reviews on an E-commerce Site.
- The service should handle both real-time and batch queries.
- It should also be capable of ingesting data.
Focus Areas:
- Database design
- API layer interaction
- High-Level Design (HLD) of the system
Candidate's Approach
No approach provided.
Interviewer's Feedback
No feedback provided.
Round 3: Coding Round
Questions:
-
Given a list of Special Numbers made only of 1 & 0 (e.g., 1, 10, 11, 100, 101, 110, 111...), find the minimum count of special numbers needed to sum to a given number N.
- Example: For N = 52, the answer is 5 (10 * 3 + 11 * 2 = 52).
-
Given n prices of different items and m coupons (where one coupon can be applied only once and halves the price), minimize the total cost for buying all items.
- Example: Prices: [4, 9, 3, 2], Coupons: 3 -> Final prices: [2, 2, 3, 2] = Total: 9.
Candidate's Approach
No approach provided.
Interviewer's Feedback
No feedback provided.
Round 4: Manager Round
Questions:
- Discussed the project and team size, including the candidate's role in handling the project.
Candidate's Approach
No approach provided.
Interviewer's Feedback
No feedback provided.
Round 5: HLD Round
Questions:
- Discussed handling the Aadhaar system for the government in India, focusing on increased registration traffic near deadlines.
- Explained three services from the user perspective: Registration, Status Service, and Notification Service.
- Addressed a scenario where one pod crashes due to a bug, and all requests to it fail while it restarts.
- Proposed using a middleware Nginx layer to track success rates for each pod and implement a circuit breaker with exponential retry.
- Discussed service distribution across data centers and database setup with multiple masters across four regions (N, W, S, E).
- Addressed a disaster scenario where the W zone DB is destroyed due to a tsunami, focusing on replication and replication factors.
Candidate's Approach
No approach provided.
Interviewer's Feedback
No feedback provided.