DE Shaw Interview Experience | Set 24 (On-Campus for internship)

DE Shaw came to my college for recruiting Systems and Operations Engineer interns.

Round 1: Online test

The first round was an online test which was conducted on Hackerrank. There were 4 sections in total: first of which was the coding section. It had only one question: to find the minimum number of bridges required to directly or indirectly connect each island in a grid. We basically had to find the number of connected components and subtract one from it. (Read this article for the DFS approach: Find the number of islands | Set 1 (Using DFS))

The other sections, namely Technical, Aptitude, and Systems, had MCQ questions. The technical section was of medium difficulty and had questions from basic SQL, OS, OOP in C++, and data structures. The aptitude section was tough, and one needed a lot of practice in order to solve a majority of questions. The systems section was relatively small and was factual in nature.

15 students were shortlisted from a total of 148 students.

Round 2: Technical interview I

There were two panels with two interviewers each, and every shortlisted student was assigned to one of those panels. The interview duration was roughly 40 minutes. The focus was mainly on the projects and internships one had mentioned in his/her resume. As the interview went on, some questions specific to the job profile were also asked. I had done 2 projects, first of which was a recommender system made using Django and Scikit-learn. I was asked questions on web technology (difference b/w POST and GET, what are APIs) and machine learning (K-means clustering). The second project was a handwritten digit recognizer build using Tensorflow. While describing the project, I used the term GPU so I was asked how is it different from a CPU. Basically, one can be asked any question from the field one has worked upon. It is necessary to keep calm and try to give intelligent guesses if one is not sure of an answer. As of the hardware part, I was asked how the frequency mismatch between processor and RAM is handled.

6 students were shortlisted from this round.

Round 3: Technical interview II and HR interview

The technical interview had to be given to the panel other than that from the previous interview. This time the questions were from a wide range, like which data structures can be used to implement a file manager, the difference between classes and objects, kernels, normalization, software lifecycle models, etc. I was also asked a puzzle about finding the fastest 2 horses among 25 horses with minimum races (Puzzle 9 | (Find the fastest 3 horses))

The HR round was fairly simple. You just have to explain your projects and what you learned from them, your future plans, why do you wish to work for DE Shaw, and your dream companies. I was also asked a guesstimate question.

In the end, two students were selected for the internship and I was lucky enough to be one of them.