Indeed Interview Experience for Data Engineer | On-Campus 2022

Indeed visited our campus (IIT Hyderabad) for SDE and Data Engineer roles. There was resume shortlisting based on GPA and department. There was 1 Technical round held on the Karat Platform (1 hour). On placements day there were 3 rounds of interviews (1 hour each) followed by 1 HR round (30 mins).

Technical Round: The interviewer was very forthcoming and first told me a little bit about his work and then asked me to introduce myself briefly. He told me I was allowed to google syntax and functions if I wanted.

• He then asked me to write a SQL query. It was a SELECT statement with LEFT JOIN and which needed to be in sorted order and was fairly basic. He asked me to write another statement where I was required to print the Top K records based on some sorted field.
• After that came DSA where he said I can use any language my Python was preferred. The first question was about an employee entry and exit recording system where we had to print all employees who had exited but not entered and vice versa based on a log of events. A simple logic worked for this problem. 
• The second question was a little tougher and I did not have time to code it completely, but I explained the logic and steps to code it along with complexity. He seemed to be satisfied that it would work.

First Round: I was first told to introduce myself and speak about projects I did that that I was most interested in. The interviewer was very nice and seemed interested in what I had to say.

• Given string s and a list of valid words, find the number of occurrences of all valid words in string s. I first explained the O(n2) brute force method and gave the code for that (No execution required). After that, I explained the Rabin-Karp method for optimization.
• SQL question based on finding the row with Kth largest salary. Follow-up: How to do this without using the OFFSET keyword.
• System design question based on video streaming service (Similar to system design for YouTube).

Second Round: The next interviewer gave me a pair programming HackerRank link where I had to solve 3 fairly easy questions.

• Find the number of odd numbers between some range (E.g. 0-5 ->1,3,5 ->3)
• Given number n, find the number of steps required to reduce to 0. If n = even, divide n by 2 else n-1 and continue. E.g. 8->4->2->1->0 = 5 steps.
• Return the sum of all even terms in the first N fibonacci numbers. E.g. n = 5 -> 1,2,3,5,8 -> 2 + 8 = 10.

Third Round: Given 2d grid of letters, find the frequency of all words present in the grid. 

• At each step, we can move in all 8 directions (Word Search Problem on LeetCode). How to optimize it further? (Hint: use prefix tree). 
• I was only required to write the code for this, execution was not needed.

Fourth Round: Asked to introduce myself and talk about thesis work. 

• The interviewer was mainly interested in whether I would suit the role of Data Engineer or not. My work was mostly in AI ML so I spoke more about my experience in that and why I switched to Computer Science from mechanical.
• I recommend practicing SQL properly as it is very important for Data Engineer role. DSA is also very important, the difficulty of questions is not as hard compared to SDE role. Also brush up on standard System Design questions.

It was a very smooth process and Indeed interviewers were incredibly professional and easy to talk to. Thank you to the GfG community that has helped me so much during my preparation.