Round 1: Online Assessment (90 mins on HackerRank)
Questions:
- Closest Numbers Problem (Easy to Medium - LeetCode style)
- Arrange Words Problem (Medium to Hard)
- Minimum Total Weight Problem (Easy)
Candidate's Approach
No approach provided.
Interviewer's Feedback
No feedback provided.
Round 2: Problem-Solving (45 mins)
Questions:
- Discussion on projects from my resume
- Follow-up questions related to APIs
- Real-time API scenario-based question
- Basic questions on Java keywords
- Testing concepts
- Spring Framework concepts: Dependency Injection, Entity, and basic Spring-related questions
- Coding task: Reverse a String
Candidate's Approach
No approach provided.
Interviewer's Feedback
No feedback provided.
Round 3: System Design (45 mins)
Questions:
- Design a Payment Service to Handle Sending Money
- Functional and Non-Functional Requirements
- High-Level Design (HLD)
- APIs and Database schema
- Flowchart of the overall system
- Design an Elevator System for an 8-story Building with 10 Lifts
- Used scheduling algorithms
- Explained multithreaded concepts
Candidate's Approach
No approach provided.
Interviewer's Feedback
No feedback provided.
Round 4: Role Specialization (45 mins)
Questions:
- Application of OOPs concepts in real-world scenarios
- Design principles used in recent projects and their advantages
- Differences between synchronized and non-synchronized code; thread safety explained with examples
- Corrected a code snippet to make database connections thread-safe
Candidate's Approach
No approach provided.
Interviewer's Feedback
No feedback provided.
Round 5: Bar Raiser (45 mins)
Questions:
- Scalability Questions:
- How to scale an application effectively?
- Scenario: For an Amazon inventory system, if a customer searches for a product (e.g., Samsung TV) and finds it sold out, what could be implemented to improve the user experience?
- How to ensure that products are always available to customers?
Candidate's Approach
No approach provided.
Interviewer's Feedback
No feedback provided.
Final Verdict
Selected for the position of Software Engineer 2 at PayPal (Grad 23)