Round 1
Questions: The problem asked was -> Flipkart SDE-2 Machine Coding Round.
In this round, there were 50-60 participants along with members from the hiring team. One of them walked us through the problem and answered all clarifying questions in 30 minutes. The remaining 90 minutes were given to implement the problem such that the code should be demoable. At the end, we needed to submit the code in a zip file.
Candidate's Approach
The candidate was able to code it out in time and during the code evaluation round (which was on the same day), demonstrated the code to the interviewer and was asked to run various edge cases. Although some test cases were failing, the candidate fixed the logic on the fly.
Interviewer's Feedback
No feedback provided.
Round 2
Questions: Two medium questions on trees were asked in this round:
- Trim a Binary Search Tree - discussed the recursive solution using min-max range concept.
- Amount of Time for Binary Tree to be Infected - the candidate immediately recognized that BFS should be applied after storing parent-child relationships in a hash table for 3-way traversal.
The interviewer asked follow-up questions, such as what if there are multiple nodes with the same value, which the candidate answered and implemented.
Candidate's Approach
The candidate effectively discussed and implemented solutions for both questions, demonstrating a clear understanding of tree traversal and recursive techniques.
Interviewer's Feedback
The candidate was informed immediately after the round that they had been selected for the Design round, indicating a positive impression.
Round 3
Questions: The candidate was asked to design a system similar to Spotify, which involves millions of songs and users. The design needed to account for songs being singles or part of albums, with query constraints on singers.
Candidate's Approach
The candidate gathered all functional requirements (FRs) and non-functional requirements (NFRs) and proceeded to design the low-level design (LLD) by identifying actors/entities and relationships. However, they struggled with questions regarding relationships among classes and how the design would serve the queries. The remaining time was spent on high-level architecture, where the candidate felt unprepared and blanked out at times. They also faced challenges with Elastic search implementation and capacity estimation, and struggled with using third-party tools for drawing the architecture.
Interviewer's Feedback
No feedback provided.