Round 1: Leadership Principles + DSA
The interview started with a discussion on leadership principles for around 10–15 minutes. The interviewer focused on understanding real experiences, asking questions around situations where I took ownership, handled conflicts, and made decisions under uncertainty. It was less about textbook answers and more about structured storytelling (STAR format helped a lot here).
After that, we moved to a DSA problem. The question was based on a greedy approach combined with permutations and arrangement logic. The difficulty level was around a 3-star CodeChef problem, requiring both intuition and careful handling of edge cases.
I first explained a brute-force idea, then optimized it using greedy reasoning. The interviewer was particularly interested in my thought process—why I chose a certain approach and how I ensured correctness. I was able to code the solution and discuss time complexity clearly.
Round 2: Project Deep Dive + Trie
This round started with 20 minutes of intense project discussion. The interviewer picked one of my major projects and went deep into:
Architecture decisions
Scalability concerns
Edge cases and failure handling
Real-world applicability
They kept drilling down until they were convinced I had actually built and understood the system end-to-end.
After that, the focus shifted to DSA again—specifically Trie and string-based problems. Questions included:
Basic Trie implementation
Optimizations for prefix-based queries
Handling variations like substring search and memory constraints
The discussion was very interactive, with follow-up questions at each step to test depth rather than just surface-level knowledge.
Overall Experience
The interviews were well-structured and focused heavily on:
Clear communication
Strong fundamentals in DSA
Deep understanding of projects
It wasn’t about solving the hardest problems but about demonstrating clarity of thought, structured problem-solving, and genuine ownership of work.
A solid mix of behavioral + practical DSA + real-world system thinking.