Grab Interview Experience for SDE FTE (On-Campus)

Recently GRAB came to our campus (Jadavpur University) for the SDE profile (Both FTE and 6M internship). 

There were a total of 4 rounds:

Online Coding Round: There were three questions to be completed in 3 hours. The questions were pretty straight forward.

1. 1st question was given two integers A and B, we had to find the count of numbers in the range [A, B] which can be expressed as a product of two consecutive elements. 
2. The 2nd question was to find the minimum number of negative sums that must be applied to a sequence of integers (a0, a1, …, aN) so that each pair of consecutive integers in this sequence alternates between strictly decreasing (a[i] < a[i+1)] and strictly increasing (a[i] > a[i+1]). Example: In (2, 3, 5, 7), the minimum number of negative sums is 2. A possible solution is to add -2 to the 2nd element and then add -3 to the last element, resulting in (2, 1, 5, 4).

I don’t remember the third question exactly.

After this 16 people were shortlisted for the Technical interview round.

Technical Interview Round: In this round, I was asked to code two questions first, sort a linked list in O(1) space (Stack space doesn’t count) and the second question was a slight variation of finding max subtree sum in a binary tree. After these two questions, the interviewer asked me to compare quick sort, merge sort, and heap sort. Then the difference between Prim’s and Kruskal’s Algorithm was asked, and then we had a discussion about my project.

After this 8 people were shortlisted for the hiring manager round.

Manager Round: This round was again a technical round only. The manager started with projects, then asked about how hashing is implemented. Then he asked me to write the production-ready code of finding the second max element in an array in linear time and constant space and after that, he slightly modified the problem by adding a few additional cases. After this, he asked me why do I want to be a part of the software industry and all.

After this 4 people were shortlisted for the HR round.

HR Round: The HR round was just a discussion of all things I do and have worked under pressure. Give example.

All 4 people were shortlisted, and I am glad to be one of them 😀