EPAM Systems Interview Experience(On-Campus)

EPAM Systems visited my campus during my final year of MCA. It was in the month of June 2022 and the eligibility criteria were 60% throughout means 60% above is required in 10th, 12th, and in Graduation till now. As with every other campus, our placement cell shared a Google form to apply. I filled in my details and applied for the company. The whole selection process was of 5 rounds including online coding tests. This company emphasizes a lot on JAVA.

First Round: After applying all the shortlisted students got an email for the first round. It was an online coding round (I forgot the platform on which it was hosted). This round was of 1 hour and we need to solve 4 coding questions. The difficulty of the questions was Leetcode easy to medium level. The main challenge here was of time constraint of 1 hour. I was able to solve 3 questions and got shortlisted for the next round.

Second Round: This round was an offline coding round which was in our University computer lab under supervision. Here we were given 10 MCQs from SQL, Object Oriented Programming, and JAVA also 2 coding questions. I was able to answer all the questions and cleared this round.

• Some of the MCQ topics were SQL Joins, SQL Aggregate functions, Java string pool, Abstract classes and Interfaces, Inheritence, Runtime Polymorphism, etc.
• Both the coding questions were HARD level on leetcode, first was Trapping Rain Water and the second was on Dynamic Programming (I forgot the question).

Third Round: After a month I got mail for this round, it was a group discussion round. After the second round only 40 students were shortlisted for this round. It was on Zoom and the 10 students and 1 interviewer joined. The topic of discussion was “Does family tradition limits your future”. The interviewer gave us 2 mins to prepare and what are the odds of the interviewer calling my name to start the discussion (well the odds were in my favor). The interviewer gave everyone only one chance to speak. This meeting was around 30 mins and everyone spoke once. Shockingly, a lot of students were disqualified in this round.

Fourth Round: This was a technical round and purely based on JAVA, Object Oriented Programming, and 1 coding question. This round went on for 1 hour straight and the first 30 mins were only for rapid-fire questions on JAVA and OOPS. Some of the questions were

• Explain inheritance with a working coding example.
• Explain Polymorphism with a coding example (Both compile time and runtime).
• Difference between an Abstract class and an Interface.
• Can we overload the main method in Java?
• What actually the ‘@Override’ annotation means in Java and what will happen if we remove it?
• What is synchronized block and how it works?

There were a lot more questions but these are the ones that I remember. So, after the 30 mins of JAVA questions, the interviewer asked me a coding question. The question was “Given a list of failed IP Addresses from a server return the K most frequently failed IP Addresses”. First I told him the approach and then I started coding and explaining at the same time. After coding the solution I told the interviewer the time and space complexity of the solution and also asked if I need to optimize it but he told me that it was good enough. The next day I got the mail for the HR round.

Fifth round: This was one of the worst HR rounds for me. It only went for 9 to 10 mins. The interviewer asked me around 8 to 9 questions in 9 mins. The questions were about behavior. Some of the questions were

• Tell me a time when you played a leadership role.
• How do you update yourself in Technology?
• What are your weaknesses?
• Tell me about a time when you worked in a team.

These are the questions that I remember, Obviously, I was never in some of these situations so I made them up on the fly but it went really bad for me as if the interviewer has no interest in the interview and he just want to get it over with.

The whole interview process went on for about 3 months and in September our college got the result from the company saying only 4 students were selected and I was one of them. But due to the recession, I still haven’t got the offer letter from the company.

My Personal Advice:

If you just applied for EPAM Systems and want to prepare for the process, Start solving leetcode questions, first start with very easy questions and gradually make your way to medium and hard, also make sure your JAVA skills are on point. Additionally, prepare Object Oriented Programming’s every concept with an actual real-world example. Become familiar with some basic Data Structures like Array, Stack, Queue, Priority Queue, HashMap, etc Finally All the Best..