Akamai Interview Experience for Internship (On-Campus)

Akamai visited our campus to hire students for the summer internship program. About 300 students from our branch (Computer Science and Engineering) took the test. The process had an online assessment followed by 3 rounds of interviews.

Round 0 (Online Assessment):

This Hacker Rank test lasted for 75 min and consisted of 9 MCQ questions based on CS fundamentals (Computer Networks, Operating Systems, DBMS, OOPS,, etc.), 2 Coding questions and one SQL query-based question. The two coding questions were very similar to the following questions:

1. https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/minimum-number-platforms-required-railwaybus-station/
2. https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/minimum-number-increment-operations-make-array-elements-equal/

25 students were shortlisted for the interview rounds.

Round 1 (Technical Round):

In this round high emphasis was given to testing coding skills and thought processes to solve the coding problems. The round itself lasted for more than an hour. 5 coding questions were asked in this round, and we were supposed to explain the approach on an online whiteboard first and then code it on an online editor. The questions were very similar to:

1. https://www.hackerearth.com/practice/basic-programming/implementation/basics-of-implementation/practice-problems/algorithm/passing-the-parcel/ (similar problem)
2. https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/design-a-stack-that-supports-getmin-in-o1-time-and-o1-extra-space/
3. https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/move-zeroes-end-array/
4. https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/stock-buy-sell/
5. A strings-based question, I don’t remember the exact question, but it was of easy-medium level.

Around 12 students were shortlisted for the next round.

Round 2 (Managerial Round):

In this round emphasis was given to projects & certifications in the resume, some CS fundamentals and managerial questions. This round lasted for an hour. The round started with ‘Tell me about yourself’ and later started discussing the projects in the resume. The questions related to the project were:

1. Why did you choose SQL database over no-SQL?
2. How are you taking the security aspects of the application into account?
3. A few questions related to AWS S3 (as I’ve mentioned that I used it in my project).
4. How am I storing the records in the database?
5. To implement the Disjoint-Set data structure as I spoke about it in one of the explanations.

The interviewers were pretty impressed with my explanations. Then the interview was navigated towards the managerial side, a few standard questions such as: How do you handle a conflict? Where do you see yourself in 5 year? etc. were asked.

6 students were shortlisted for the next round.

Round 3 (HR Round):

In this round was a pretty chill round, The interviewer asked some simple questions such as what are your hobbies, Tell me something that is not in your resume, what are your interests, what are your long-term goals etc. This round was for less than 30 min.

After a hour or so the shortlist of the selected students was shared via the placement officer, and all 6 of us were selected.