Cloudera Interview Experience for SDE (On-Campus)

Cloudera came to our Campus around August-end, 2021. A total of 250+ students with 8+ CGPA were allowed to give Online tests. There were in total 4 rounds.

Round 1: Online coding test, Duration 100mins (Medium)

• It consisted of 4 questions, that needed to be solved within 100 minutes.
• The first question was a pretty standard problem related to 3 Sum.
• The second question was a very good one, it required some string manipulation and extractions, say you are given a string, then you have to modify the string, based on the number of pages(p) you have and the maximum characters that can be present in the line(k). Also, if you can’t fit a word completely, then it had to be transferred to the new line. And each page was divided into two subsections, both subsections contain the same number of lines.

Example: Given string = Geeks for geeks is a very good platform to learn coding.
p = 2, k = 10
Output:Geeks for geeks is a (page1)very good platform (page1)to learn coding (page2)

• The third question was a medium-level SQL query, which involved using correlated query concepts.
• The last question was a kind of experience based on a situation.

I did all the questions ( 2,3 test cases of 2nd question were failing). A total of 45 students were shortlisted from around 250+

Round 2: Tech interview (1 hour)

• There were two interviewers in this round, the round started with them giving their introduction, and then finally I told them about myself.
• They started by asking me about my project which I did during my internship. Then they asked some standard questions related to OOPS, OS, like Virtual memory, deadlocks, OOPs pillars and their explanation, real-life examples, why do we need OOPs, what is the significance of Polymorphism in real life, its types. Then they asked me about my favorite coding language ( C++), knowing which they asked me about how is the code executed in the backend once you start compiling and running the program.
• After all these theoretical questions, they gave me 2 coding questions.
• First was an easy one, given an array, if all the elements in the array occur even number of times, then print true else false.
• The second question was to design a DS, which will handle remove, min Element, max element, add in the overall lowest possible time.
• In the end they asked me if I have some questions for them, this is the best moment when you can get to know about the ambition of the company from the employees themselves.

Round 3: Tech interview( 45 minutes)

The round started with my introduction followed by the introduction of the interviewer. Then we straight moved to the coding part after a little discussion on my internship project.

• First question was pattern matching, given two strings you have to find whether they follow same pattern or not.

Example: String1 = aabac
String2: cat cat dog cat cow

• This will return true, as both the strings are following same pattern ( a = cat, b = dog and c = cow), then after that a hard variation was asked, in which the string2 had no spaces given.
• The second question was to delete a tree without a memory leak, but without using any recursion, any queue, any stacks at all, Basically with constant space.
• In the end, I asked him some questions regarding the company

Round 4: Hiring Manager Round(1 hour)

• The round began with the introduction of the manager followed by my introduction. He was a very nice guy, asked me about my studies, how is my family doing, etc. After that, he started looking at my CV, and he was very interested in my internship project.
• So He asked me to explain the whole project in a complete detailed manner. In the end, he asked me some behavioral questions like where do you see yourself in X years, higher studies, weaknesses, and strengths, etc. At last, the round ended as usual with me asking them some questions regarding the company.

A total of 4 students were selected out of 45. I was one of them.

Tips: Be Humble, Honest, and Respectful. They don’t expect you to give each and every answer possible. They are just testing your thinking ability, how easily are you able to handle the situation, how well optimized your final solution is. Don’t take too much time on the very first question, as many interviewers expect to give more than one question. All the best!!