AppDynamics Interview Expereince for SDE-1 (On-Campus)

AppDynamics visited our campus (Tier-1) on October ’22. The selection procedure consisted of an initial resume screening, followed by an Online Assessment and 3 rounds of interviews.

Criteria: Circuital branches (open for both B. Tech and M. Tech) with a CGPA of >=7.

ONLINE ASSESSMENT

Platform: Hackerrank

Format: 15 MCQs + 3 Coding

• Coding 1 – https://leetcode.com/discuss/interview-question/2939585/AppDynamics-or-Maximum-Common-Companies
• Coding 2 – A greedy question similar to https://leetcode.com/discuss/interview-question/783699/Recycling-Cartridges-or-OA-or-Hackerrank
• Coding 3 – A variation of subset-sum.

MCQs – In addition to some aptitude and guessing the output, questions related to Huffman Coding, B Trees, Basic Inheritance, TCP, DNS, Master-Slave Architecture in DBMS, Paging, and Semaphores were asked to test overall core CS fundamentals.

Out of 160 students, 21 were shortlisted and 29 were waitlisted for further processes, me being one of them.

INTERVIEWS

Round 1

50mins. WebEx + Screen Sharing.

2 coding questions were asked.

• Coding 1: A question on the directed graph which basically boiled down to performing DFS taking into account certain conditions. Code + Dry run expected.
• Coding 2: In a number line from 0 to N (10^9), there exist some n (10^5) integer points resembling stones. Stones are guaranteed to be present in 0, 1, and N. Initially an agent takes a step a jump of length 1 only, from 0 to 1, post which he can take a non-zero forward jump of length k-1, k, or k+1 – where k is the length of his previous jump. Find a minimum number of jumps in which the agent can reach point N from 0. Return -1 if not possible. Code + Dry run expected.

10 were shortlisted for Round 2.

Round 2:

1hr. Managerial Round.

This round mainly consisted of questions based on my resume and work done in a previous internship(s).

One of the internships involved me monitoring real-time metrics of their application stack, and there was an in-depth discussion of how I went about it, which then slowly shifted to some questions on Kubernetes, Calico, BGP (I had written both Kubernetes and Networking in my resume). This went around 35mins.

It was followed by some basic questions on OS, mainly revolving around the topics of process synchronization.

The next 10mins or so went about discussing one of the projects I had on my resume.

Round 3

15mins. HR and Cultural-fit Round.

In this round, the interviewer was mainly interested in knowing what I knew about Cisco and AppDynamics, why I wanted to join, and so on. I was also asked to share my on-campus engagements and whether I was involved in any team role/ leadership-role or not.

Within 2hrs of completion of my Round 3, the results were declared and I was one of 4 selected from our campus.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• AppDynamics doesn’t expect you to be a very high-rated Competitive Programmer, good practice in Medium-Hard DSA questions should suffice easily.
• Well-rounded knowledge in OOPS, OS, DBMS, and Networking was expected as demonstrated by their MCQ set. They weren’t very conceptually deep/tough but it was important to cover all topics. Interview Round 2 had questions involving basic OS but some in-depth Networking.
• Decently good communication skills were expected as one had to both explain and dry-run their code in Round 1 and explain projects/concepts in Round 2.
• A very stronghold of the projects/internship works present in one’s resume was mandatory, as an entire 1hr was spent on it. They didn’t expect one to compulsorily have prior experience in one particular domain or tech stack, they basically tested the old one had on the domain he/she had explored during college.
• They were decently CGPA biased, all 4 selected had their CGPAs over 8.5, with 3 of them having >=9.