Gainsight Interview Experience for Associate Software Engineer 2021

It was a pool campus drive conducted by Gainsight. In which all the colleges affiliated with my University were invited to participate. There was a total of 1240 students shortlisted for the Online Assessment Round.

Round 1(Online Assessment): It was a web-proctored round conducted on HackerEarth. There were 16 MCQs and 4 coding questions. The MCQs were based on Data Structures and Algorithms, DBMS, and O.S. Out of the 4 coding questions, the difficulty level was – 1 hard, 1 medium and 2 easy. I was able to solve 1 hard, 2 easy questions completely and the medium one partially.

Round 2(Technical Interview 1): Out of 1240 students only 65 were shortlisted for the interview rounds. In this round, the interviewer asked my introduction and the following things:

Coding Questions:

1. I was given an array that was sorted till n-1 elements and the nth element was not at its right position, So I have to put that nth element at its right position and make the array sorted with the most optimized approach. 
   • There are two intuitive approaches to solve this question, one is the two pointers approach and another one is the binary search approach. I decided to go with the binary search approach as it was more optimized. There were few edge cases with it but I was able to pass them all and the interviewer was satisfied.
2. He asked me to find an element in a row and column-wise sorted n x n matrix.
   • Here is the question link – https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/search-in-row-wise-and-column-wise-sorted-matrix/. I was able to give an efficient solution of time complexity O(n).
3. Now the interviewer told me to code for Binary Search Tree, i.e Make the structure and start coding from the base itself and complete function code for all the B.S.T operations i.e Insertion, Searching, Deletion. I was able to code for it and the interviewer was satisfied with my code explanation.
4. The interviewer asked me one more question on Binary Tree but I am not able to recall it now, we have discussed the approach for solving that problem for nearly 15 minutes but the interviewer didn’t ask me to code for it as we were already running above time.

This Interview went for 1 hour and 15 minutes.

Round 3(Technical Interview 2): 34 students were selected for this round. In this round, the interviewer asked my introduction and the following things:-

1. Coding Question: He asked me general questions on B.S.T and then gave me this problem:-
   • https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/connect-nodes-at-same-level-with-o1-extra-space/ . First of all we discussed the approach for this question, I have to make a few changes in the tree node structure also and then finally he told me to code for the same. I solved this problem using a queue and keeping an extra pointer in the tree node structure that will point to the next right node. He was satisfied with my code explanation.
2. Coding Question: He asked me to rotate a matrix by 90 degrees clockwise without using extra space.
   • Here is the question link- https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/rotate-a-matrix-by-90-degree-in-clockwise-direction-without-using-any-extra-space/. I was able to code it and the interviewer was satisfied.
3. Coding Question: He asked me the Josephus problem:- https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/josephus-problem-set-1-a-on-solution/. He told me to code for this problem. I was able to code for this problem but my approach was not very efficient. Though my approach was intuitive and code explanation was good, So interviewer was satisfied.
4. SQL Query – Find 2nd highest salary, then find 3rd highest and at the end, he asked me to write a generalized query to find nth maximum salary.
5. Few Questions on O.O.P.S concepts, Deadlock and  DBMS.

This interview went for 1 hour and 15 minutes.

Round 4(Managerial / Hiring Manager Round): 30 students were shortlisted for this round. This round was a mix of technical and managerial questions. Usually, these rounds were taken by a senior person of the company i.e Director or V.P of Engineering.

The following questions were asked by the interviewer:

1. My Introduction.
2. My Projects, He asked me to briefly explain about my final year project and what technical difficulties I faced in building it and how did I tackle it.
3. He asked me to share my screen, open the browser and Explain the DNS Server and how World Wide Web works.
4. He asked me about my favorite subject, I said – DSA and then he asked some questions about it.
5. He asked me some general questions to check my thought process Like he asked me- What do you think, How the search engine works? How does youtube recommendation work? etc.
6. What difficulties did you face in your internships?
7. Some situation-based questions.

This interview went for 45 minutes.

Result: The result came after 2 days of the H.M round. 16 students were selected in total,14 students were selected for the SDE role and 2 students were selected for the SDET role. I was selected for the SDE role 🙂 .