Flipkart Interview Experience for SDE Internship | On-Campus 2021

Flipkart recently visited our campus, hiring for SDE Internship for summer 2021. They were open only for students in CSE and had no CGPA criteria. 

The hiring workflow consisted of 4 rounds in total ( 1 Coding Round, 2 Technical Interviews, and 1 HM Interview ).

Note: Everything, including the interviews, was online due to the COVID situation.

Round 1 ( Coding Round ):  We were given 3 questions to solve within 90 mins.

1. Count of all nodes at even height from the given root in a General m-ary Tree.
   Similar tohttps://www.geeksforgeeks.org/print-nodes-odd-levels-tree/”> this article but for a general tree and even levels.
   
2. Sort first k values in ascending order and remaining n-k values in descending order.
   
3. Given a string A consisting of lowercase alphabets and a list of strings B find the number of strings in B that forms a substring after deleting at most k characters from A also these operations is allowed on strings in B :
   a. We can change character ‘o’ to ‘a’, ‘t’ to ‘i’, and vice-versa.
   b. We can delete one character from the current string.

The submitted codes were tested on multiple hidden test cases. 11 Students were shortlisted for further rounds.

Round 2 ( Technical Interview ): This round was held on the Aspiring Minds Codemeet platform which is a Live Coding Interview Platform. The interviewer asked to write only Pseudo Code for the following questions :

1. The minimum number of subarrays of a given array of numbers such that every subarray is either increasing or decreasing.
   
2. Find if there is a rectangle in binary matrix with corners as 1

Question 1 Example :
arr = [1,2,3,3,1,5,6,7,8,7,4]
Ans - 4  ( 1,2,3 | 3,1 | 5,6,7,8 | 7,4 )
     ( Inc   , Dec , Inc     , Dec )
Therefore we can have 4 subarrays such that they 
are either all increasign or decreasig.
Note : We have just have to find alternating sequence
for increasing or decreasing from first index to last.

The questions were easy and I gave the correct solution for both. (Actually gave a Recursive DP approach for the first question initially but changed to simple iterative after I realized it’s just a basic array partition problem.)

After this 9/11 students were qualified for further rounds. 

Round 3 ( Technical Interview ): This round was also held on the same Codemeet platform and the interviewer asked to write the pseudo-code for the 1st question and the 2nd question was only for discussion.

1. Given a Binary Tree you have to perform the given operation recursively :
   a. Print all Leaf nodes.
   b. Assume all Leaf nodes are deleted.
   c. Go to step a
   The solution for this problem is similar to this article Count of leaf nodes required to be removed at each step to empty a given Binary Tree
   
2. Given a Complete Binary Tree where each level is sorted in increasing order and the next level has elements greater than the maximum of the current level, discuss a method to implement searching of value in this tree.  https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/check-if-value-exists-in-level-order-sorted-complete-binary-tree/

Q 1 . Example :
             1
            /  \
           2    3 
          / \    
         4   5   
     For this the answer would be 
     First Time -  4,5,3
     Second Time - 2
     Third Time -  1
    Note : The set in which a node will belong to is 
    the maximum distance from all leaf node in that subtree.
    
Q 2 . Example :
               3
           5      8
         9  11  12  14
      Note : If we need to search any element we have to 
      look if we get the range of nodes where that node 
      could be by having 2 pointers , one going only left 
      and the other only right.
      
      Time Complexity would be O(log^2(n))

I answered both of them correctly. (Just messed up a bit for time complexity for 2nd question ).

After this 7/11 were qualified for the last round. 

Round 4 ( Hiring Manager Interview ): This round was similar to any HR round but was conducted by a Senior Developer. The main focus was mostly on behavioral questions, my past experiences, and projects.

After a brief introduction, these questions were asked :

1. What is your past internship experience and what was your role? (Asked because I had mentioned that I had previous internship experience)
2. What contribution did you make to opensource and what’s its use case? (Asked as I mentioned contribution to opensource.)
3. Why is your CGPA low and how would you work on improving it? (I have 7.7/10 CGPA :D)
4. Tell me about two of your weaknesses (One personal and one Technical)?
5. Have you ever lead a team, and what was your takeaway?

Apart from this, there were some more random questions were also asked. Finally, It was my time to ask any questions I had, and I had a lot of them. We both ended the interview on a positive note and soon after I got the email for selection.

A total of 3 students were selected for the Flipkart 2021 SDE Internship from my campus.

Some General Tips – 

• Be confident about your solution in the Technical Interviews
• Always provide your interviewer with a non-efficient solution if you can not arrive at an optimal solution on the first try.
• Make use of the whiteboard if there are any in your Interview IDE (It provides a better way to represent your thoughts).
• Ask your interviewer questions at the end of every interview if they are open to it. ( Personal, Technical, or regarding Internship )