Texas Instruments — ITS OPS Intern Interview Experience

The interview began with a brief self-introduction, covering:

• Hometown
• Undergraduate degree and college
• Current academic status
• Key achievements

There were three interviewers on the panel.

Projects

Q1. Explain your projects.

The interviewer asked for an overview of all projects mentioned on the resume. I focused mainly on the project I had prepared most thoroughly, after which they started asking detailed technical questions about it.

Authentication & OAuth

Q2. You mentioned that users are authenticated using JWT. Explain the authentication protocol, Keycloak integration, and the OAuth 2.0 flow you used. Why did you choose it?

I requested permission to share my screen and explained the project's architecture diagram.

I covered:

• Complete JWT authentication workflow
• How the request moves from the public gateway to authentication
• Access-token generation and validation
• What happens when the access token expires
• How the refresh-token flow works
• How Keycloak works and how it was integrated into the application
• The specific OAuth 2.0 flow used
• Why PKCE (Proof Key for Code Exchange) was chosen over other alternatives

The interviewer asked multiple questions together, so I structured my response step-by-step. When I lost track of one part of the question, I asked them to clarify it and then answered it.

Key preparation areas from this round:

1. JWT authentication
2. OAuth 2.0
3. PKCE flow
4. Keycloak
5. Access vs. refresh tokens
6. API Gateway authentication flow
7. Project architecture and implementation details