Blinkit Interview Experience

Recently, I came across a linked post by an SDE-2 saying there is an opening for SDE 1. I DM my resume through LinkedIn and received an interview call.

Round 1 – DSA :

Started with our introductions. He explained about his work and I explained about my work, It went on for around 5 to 10 mins.

Then he moved on to the DSA problem. He asked a very standard famous problem from leetcode – Search in sorted matrix 2 (https://leetcode.com/problems/search-a-2d-matrix-ii/).

I gave 2 naive approaches initially (NM) and (NlogM) approaches first, and then gave the optimal (N+M) solution. He asked me to code the optimal solution and I did it pretty quickly. He copied and pasted the same test case from leetcode and we ran it against a few ‘targets’, and it worked correctly.

Still, around 30 mins were left in the interview. He told me that there was an even better solution for the problem, I was confused at this point as I’ve solved this problem before and I knew this was the best solution. He kept giving hints like thinking of binary search, thinking of only the last element etc.

I thought of alternate approaches but they all were worse than (N+M). After 10 minutes he told us we could go through the last column from top to bottom and do a binary search only when the element < target. It worked on the test case he gave and said it would be O(N+logM).

I was confused and told him I was not sure if this would work on edge cases. He said it would work fine and moved on to the questions from my work and personal projects. He asked a couple of questions which I answered quickly and asked if I had questions for him. I asked 3 to 4 questions and the interview ended after that.

After two days I got a rejection mail saying I’m not fit for the role at the moment. I was like how do you take someone’s interview without even knowing the answer? Felt like I deserved to go ahead for the LLD round but it’s sad to see I got rejected due to the interviewer’s fault.