Bigbasket Interview Experience for SDE (On-Campus) 2022

Bigbasket is India’s largest online food and grocery store. 

There were a total of 4 rounds (3 technical + HR) for the selection process.

Online coding round

This round was taken on HackerEarth and consisted of 3 questions :

1. Matrix Traversal (Medium): Similar to this problem, but instead of maximum sum, minimum cost was required. Could be solved by simple recursion or dynamic programming.
2. Word matching (Hard): Similar to this problem. To solve this problem you need to know the implementation of the Trie data structure.
3. Slot Machine 2.0: Can’t find a similar problem on the internet but the statement goes as, 
   • A slot machine has multiple wheels that are spun n times. in each spin, each wheel may have multiple stops from 1 to 9 and shows one random number on the machine’s dashboard. given the number of spins n, determine the minimum number of stops on each wheel to produce the numbers displayed on the dashboard for each spin. then, calculate the total stops.
   • e.g. n = 4, spins[] = [‘712’, ‘246’, ‘365’, ‘312’]
   • To solve this problem, you have to sort each string and then for each string add the max element at the ith index of each string to the ans.

I was able to solve all of the questions but had to submit multiple times to get accepted for the 2nd problem. Still qualified for the next round.

Technical Interview 1

This round was a virtual round in which the interviewer asked me about this medium-level problem. I was able to solve this problem in around 30-40 mins. He asked questions in between me solving the problem. After that, I dry-ran the solution and then finally ran the solution in an IDE. He then checked for some corner cases. My code ran for all the test cases.

Qualified for the next round.

Technical Interview 2

In this round, the interviewer was an engineering manager. I started with the introduction and then moved to the projects. After seeing that my projects were in web development, he asked questions related to it.

• Why I used MongoDB?
• SQL vs NoSQL
• ACID properties
• HTTP response status codes
• Can you use POST request instead of GET for achieving the same result?
• Is the node multithreaded? 
• Basic questions related to operating systems
• Which sorting algorithm do you like and explain it (I chose merge sort)
• What’s the difference between merge sort and quick sort and their use cases?
• this puzzle

In the end, he asked if I had any questions. I asked how the interview went and he told me that it was good but can be improved in some areas.After hearing this I thought maybe I was not going through, but thankfully got the call for the final HR interview the next day.

HR Interview

In this round, I gave my introduction to the interviewer who was very friendly. She asked me some very basic questions about me and my background. She asked me if I have ever used the Bigbasket app and I said no laughingly as its service didn’t extend to my city. She then asked me if I was willing to move to Bangalore as this was an on-site internship and I said yes. In the end, I asked her about the culture in Bigbasket and the work-life balance. This round lasted for about 30 minutes.

Final Verdict: Selected

Skills required to crack the interview  process

• Decent knowledge of DS/Algo. No advance topic is needed
• Should know how your project actually works
• Operating systems, DBMS, Computer Networking basics