Cloudera Interview Experience | On-Campus 2021

About the company:

Cloudera Inc. is a US based Big Data solutions company (founded in 2008) which provides enterprise software that runs over the open-source Hadoop-Apache framework, and streamlines the information retrieval and data mining process with integrated ML and AI frameworks. 

There were 4 rounds in total, the first being a computer-based online test followed by 3 one to one technical, managerial and HR interviews for the shortlisted students. All 3 rounds took place in one single day one after other. Here is my experience for the same.

There was a CGPA and branch criteria for eligibility to appear for the test, and any year gap during entire education was not acceptable.

Round 1(Online Coding Test – Duration: 100 mins): Medium

• It consisted of 4 questions, that needed to be solved within 100 minutes.
• The first question was a pretty standard problem from Leetcode, https://leetcode.com/problems/largest-number
• The second question was a variation of Longest Common Subsequence, https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/minimum-cost-make-two-strings-identical
• The third question was a very good one, it required some string manipulation say you are given a paragraph so we need to format in a way how we see format of research paper i.e. 2 columns on a page, fixed number of lines, fixed length of each line paragraph as well as spacing between two columns.
• The fourth question was a medium-level SQL query, which involved the correlated query concepts.

Round 2(Tech Interview – 1 hour): The round started with interviewer giving his introduction, and then I told them about myself.

• Then they asked some standard questions related to DBMS, OOPS, OS like Virtual memory, deadlocks, OOPs pillars and their explanation, real-life examples, why do we need OOPs
• He asked me about the time complexities of the questions that I did in round 1.  
• I was also given a coding question and was asked to do live coding on codebunk platform.
• I was asked about my preferred language that was Python and few questions related to it like is python a scripting language, about tuples, sets and much more.
• In the end they asked me if I have some questions for them.

Round 3(Tech Interview – 1 hour): This round also started with introduction.

• I was asked to explain my project which I mentioned in my resume.  
• This round also consisted of core subjects such as OS like threading, in Computer Networks, I was asked to explain each layer then again DBMS and OOPS was asked.
• One coding question was asked that was of medium level. The question was maximum product of three number in O(n) time complexity. I discussed three strategies and was asked about time complexity of each.
• I was also given a puzzle to solve, it required to use binary search strategy.
• Some situation-based questions were also asked.

Round 4(HM Interview – 45 min): Interviewer went through my resume, LinkedIn profile, GitHub profile and asked questions from them.

• He asked me what I know about the company.
• Then he asked me about a concept called singleton class by which basically he wanted to see how I approach a new concept with the help of some existing knowledge.
• This round was more of behavioral round where he was analyzing my reactions and my statements upon the situations I was being put into.

Tips:  

• Be Honest. 
• They don’t expect us to give every answer perfectly but our approach is what matters. 
• They test our thinking ability, how well optimized your final solution is. 

All the best!!