Cloudera Interview Experience (On Campus)

Cloudera recently visited my college offering an FTE plus a 6-month internship. The criteria for the registration were CGPA 7.5 and above and the Job Profile was Software Engineer. There were 4 Rounds. The first round was the Online Coding Round followed by 2 Technical Virtual Interviews and one Virtual HM Round.

Round 1: Online Test

There were 3 coding questions and 1 question on DBMS.

• Minimum cost to make strings equal – You are given two strings s1 and s2. Return the MINIMUM cost to make s1 and s2 equal. Cost can be defined in terms of a number of steps as follows – In one step, you can delete exactly one character in one of the strings. The cost of each step is 5. So the total cost would be “number of steps”*5.
• Reformat text in two columns – Design an algorithm that reads lines of text reformats it and writes it out in pages of two columns- each column n characters (i.e. 40) wide – separated by a fixed 4-space gap. The first column of the output should correspond to the first half of the input text page and the second column to the second half of the input text page. In each output line of a column, the max number of words that occupy less than or n characters should be printed and no word should break across two lines. Each output page should contain m lines of text. Fixed 4 consecutive blank lines indicate the beginning of the next page. This format is very similar to how you see people publish their papers.
• Maximum Salary – As the last question of an interview, your future boss gives you a few pieces of paper with a single number (i.e. integer) written on each of them and asks you to compose the largest number from these numbers by concatenating them in the appropriate sequence. The resulting number is going to be your salary, so you are very motivated to solve this problem!
• [DBMS] – Total profit made by managers in a shop – Consider a shop maintaining a history of purchase by customers. Assume that these purchase histories are stored in 2 tables. Item table(item_id, brand, product_name, manager_id) and sales table(sold_date, sold_item, sold_quantity, sold_sales_price, sold_net_paid, sold_net_profit). Given these, we need to find out the total profit (sold_net_profit) made by specific managers in every brand,product_name for sold_date>=20200101.

A total of 30 people were shortlisted for the interviews.

Round 2: Technical Interview 1

Time: 1 hour

I was given a code pair link and was asked to code 2 problems.

• Two Sum Problem – https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/given-an-array-a-and-a-number-x-check-for-pair-in-a-with-sum-as-x/
• LRU Cache Implementation – https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/lru-cache-implementation/

After this, a few basic questions on data structures were asked.

• Difference between a binary tree and a heap
• Difference between array and a linked list
• Time complexities of all the operations that can be performed with an array
• Time complexities of all the operations that can be performed with a linked list

Round 3: Technical Interview 2

Time: 45mins

I was given a code pair link again and asked to code 1 problem. The interviewer also mentioned that the faster I’m able to solve this problem, the more points I would get.

• Burning Tree – https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/burn-the-binary-tree-starting-from-the-target-node/

I was able to give him the approach to solve this problem within 5-10mins and the interviewer was really impressed with it and then I had to code the whole thing and dry run the code and covered all the edge cases as well.

Round 4: HM Round

Time: 30 mins

This was supposed to be an HM round but I was asked in-depth technical questions about computer networks and microservices.

The interviewer asked me to introduce myself and give a brief explanation of everything that I had stated in my resume. After I explained 3 of my projects to her, she was very interested in the project that I had worked on during my summer internship and all the questions that I got were based on this in combination with computer networks.

• What is a microservice?
• Explain how a unique trace ID is being generated
• Explain how the trace ID is being propagated from one microservice to another
• Given a URL, how does an API Gateway redirect it to the destination?
• How exactly is the routing done in microservices?
• What would happen if you did not have a gateway?
• What is the difference between a gateway and a router?
• What is a discovery client?
• If you were an amazon developer and one of your servers is down and a client is requesting for that particular server. What are the different ways that you can think of to handle this situation and elaborate more on this?
• What are the advantages of using Spring Boot over Spring?
• What is DNS?
• What would happen if you type in a URL in your browser?
• Explain DHCP
• What do you know about Cloud?
• Can you name a few Cloud-based companies
• Why do you want to work at Cloudera?

Only 3 students were finally selected and I was one of them