Flipkart Interview Experience for SDE-1(Off-Campus)

Process:

• 1 Online Aptitude
• 2 Technical Rounds
• 1 Hiring Manager Round

Online Aptitude: September 2020

3 Questions of varying difficulties:

1. Given an array and an integer k, sort first k elements in increasing and others in decreasing order.
2. A medium hashmap based question, don’t remember the question exactly.
3. Advanced String matching question.

Found the question here: 

https://leetcode.com/discuss/interview-question/856450/Flipkart-or-Online-Assessment(new-grad-2021-India)-or-Draw-String

I solved the first 2 completely and the third question was able to pass 4 Test Cases out of 21. Got a call for interviews.

Technical Interview 1: October 2020, a full month after giving Online Aptitude. AMCAT Smart Meet Platform.

Again 3 questions were asked after some introductions.

• https://leetcode.com/problems/squares-of-a-sorted-array . Was asked to write pseudocode.
• https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/maximize-sum-of-k-elements-in-array-by-taking-only-corner-elements/ . Gave a recursive brute force solution of O(2^k). Was asked to optimise. Started to think of a DP solution when I remembered O(k) solution. Explained and wrote the code for it.
• https://leetcode.com/discuss/interview-question/309656/google-reorder-array-according-to-the-given-indexes. Quickly explained the constant solution. Seemed satisfied with the solution and didn’t ask to code. Then, he extended the same question to repeat the same process ‘k’ times that too without any extra space. Time was running out and after just giving me 2 mins to think, he told me we are out of time. Couldn’t give him any solution for this.

Asked if I have any questions for him. After some questions, the interview ended. In the evening on the same day, I got the call for the next interview.

Technical Interview 2: October 2020, the 1-day break between the 2 interviews. AMCAT Smart Meet Platform

This time no introduction, straight to coding questions.

1. Find the row with the maximum number of 1s. First he gave me this question, for which I gave him 3 approaches. One with naive searching O(m * n), another with a binary search on each row with O(mlogn), and another O(m+n) approach. He asked about the 2nd solution and changed the question to https://leetcode.com/problems/find-first-and-last-position-of-element-in-sorted-array/. He wanted me to write the working code for this and even loaded some test cases into the IDE which my code needed to pass.
2. https://leetcode.com/problems/sliding-window-median/. First gave him an O(n * klogk) brute force solution. Tried to build from the median in an integer stream solution. Told him will have to keep a left max heap and right min-heap. After each slide of the window, removal will be O(logk) if we keep value vs index hashmap and addition is also O(logk). Analysed time complexity and it came out to be O(nlogk) and he was satisfied with the approach and no code was needed.
3. It was kind of a generic string grouping question, but since there wasn’t much time left, he wanted me to find a hash function to distinguish each group. Gave a string-based hash, but he wanted an integer one. After a few minutes, I couldn’t come up with anything so gave a prime number based hash solution, where each number is mapped to a corresponding prime number and then multiply all the prime numbers to avoid collisions. He didn’t seem satisfied, but there was no time left.

He ended the interview after I asked some questions about the inner workings of Flipkart. Got the mail for the managerial round within 40 mins after the interview.

Hiring Manager Round: October 2020, same day after 3 hours of Tech round 2. AMCAT Smart Meet Platform

Had expected some core os, DBMS, and networking questions, but none were asked. It was a pure HR based round. Mostly the usual behavioural hr questions were asked. I don’t know how I did on this one as it was all really subjective. After 35 mins, the interviewer asked if I had any questions, and after he was done answering them, the interview ended.

Since this was an off-campus opportunity, I don’t have any idea of how many people they were interviewing or how many people they planned to hire at the end.

After 15 days of not hearing from them, I mailed HR, and he told me I didn’t make the cut.