BNY Mellon Interview Experience (On-Campus)

Online Coding Round:

1. (Easy Implementation based): Given the user ID and their login date time stamp, we had to filter out the invalid timestamps and output the number of times each user ID logged in each day.
   Due to time constraints and corner cases, I was able to solve this partially
2. Given a vector of vectors, where each vector denotes the indices of set bits in a binary number. Each vector denotes a valid binary number. Sort the numbers on the basis of their values in descending order.
   This can be done by checking the last set of bits of each number.
3. Given n types of servers. Count[i] denotes the number of ith type of server. The cost of upgrading 1 ith type server is cost[I], cost of selling 1 ith type server is sell[i]. You are given an “amount” of initial money. What is the maximum amount of upgraded servers you can get?
   Can be done using binary search.
4. Given n players, score[i] denotes the score of each player. You are given integer k. In one move, you can select a player from k players from the front and k players from the back. What is the maximum score you can have if you are allowed to pick a maximum of “candidates” number of players?
   This can be solved using the priority queue

Over 500 students took the test and 15 were shortlisted for technical interviews held offline.

Round 1:

The interviewer was a senior VP at BNY and had over 17 years of experience in various fintech companies.

He started off with going through my resume and asking me OOP based questions.

• How to call a static member of a class?
• What is virtual function?
• What is abstraction?
• What is encapsulation?
• What is the difference?
• Static binding vs dynamic binding?

He tried to get me confused between the terms and grilled me over the difference, but was satisfied with my explanation at the end.
He then moved to dbms and asked me what is outer join

He gave me a complex query involving calculating monthly cumulative salary of an employee given two tables. I was able to explain him my approach and the technique I was going to use to write the query, but I don’t know the exact syntax for a function. He was satisfied with my approach and only wanted to see how I approached the problem and moved forward.
He then asked me about my projects, about the technologies I had learnt etc.
He went through the technologies i mentioned in my resume and asked me questions based on it, most of which I could answer.
The interviewer tried to get me confused between terms, but I held my own and convincingly answered his questions.

About 11 people were selected for the next round of interviews.

Round 2:

The interviewer was again a VP at BNY. She went through my resume again and asked me to explain in detail one of my projects.

• What was the idea behind it?
• What technologies have you used?
• What was your contribution in the team?
• Why did you use this technology?
• What are the various database models you have used in your project?
• What database have you used and why?

She then asked me how do I approach a dsa problem, i explained her my thinking process by taking the example of the famous maximum sum subarray problem, going from the brute force approach to the optimal O(n) approach.
She was satisfied with answers and went forward with asking OOP and DBMS questions.
She gave me a medium level query which I was able to solve. ( Printing number of employees in a department using inner join).
She then asked me if I had done any internship, as I had not done any technology internship i mentioned the WordPress internship I had done my curriculum subject.
At the end she asked me if I had any questions I had for her.
I asked her how she started at BNY and what made her transition from a developer to a VP of Project Management.
We had a long discussion on this subject and how she grew into this role.
About 7 people were selected for the final round of interview.

Round 3:

The interviewer was a Director at BNY and was the youngest member of the India Executive Committee at BNY Mellon.
We began by having a casual chat about my college and the khau Galli beside it.

He went through my resume and asked me when and why I learnt the technologies I had mentioned in my resume. He asked me some questions based on the technologies like tableau, hadoop, which I mentioned I had an understanding of owing to my academic curriculum.

He asked me the difference between RDBMS and Columnar Database which I could not answer.

He then moved onto some HR questions.

A time I went above and beyond what was expected of me.

• What was the positive impact I had on someone, be it my family friends or anyone in my life
• What are your goals and what do you want to achieve as a software engineer?

At the end i asked some questions about how he started at BNY and the organisational structure of BNY India.
We also had a discussion on increasing role of Indian Software engineers in global companies

Results were declared the next day, and 5 students were selected out of which I was one!