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.