MTX Group Interview Experience for SDE | On-Campus 2022

MTX visited our campus in October 2021. The drive was for 3 roles- Associate SDE, SDE and Associate ML Engineer.

Round 1(Online Assessment): This round was conducted on 26th of October (2021), around 10 PM.  Platform- HackerEarth. 

• The assessment had 72 MCQs and 3 coding problems to be completed in 2h 15m. 
• The MCQs consisted of Aptitude, CS Fundamentals (OOP, DBMS, OS, etc) and a few Machine Learning problems. I would rate the difficulty level of MCQs to be easy-medium, the real challenge was quantity of questions. 
• Then there were 3 coding problems. One on bit manipulation (medium), one on array where we had to compute a “strange sum” for each query (medium), one on string manipulation (hard). 
• I completed the first one with all test cases passes, second one with 11/15 tests passed and third with 0 tests passed. As far as MCQs are concerned, I think I got if not all, most of them right. A total of 1400 students appeared for the test.

Round 2(Technical Interview 1): 16 students were shortlisted for F2F interviews out of a total of 1400. This took place on 16th of November (2021), 10 AM. With little to no introduction from their side, the interview started. 

• There were 2 panel members. I started with my introduction. As I mentioned my projects in my introduction, naturally the first question was to elaborate my project. We had a brief discussion on my projects (5-10 minutes). 
• After that they started with the coding questions. First question was kind of a warm up question on sorting and binary search to check if I understand the basics of time and space complexities. 
• After that I was asked to code a string problem (medium) while sharing my screen. 
• Then he asked a DP problem which I first solved using recursion then finally told the optimized approach. 
• After that a few more questions on DSA were asked but only for discussion, not to code these problems (I was asked about the time and space complexities of each and every problem in the interview). 
• Then a few OOP questions and the round was over. This round lasted for about 45 minutes. The interviewers were not much interactive.

Round 3(Technical Interview 2): After round 1 of F2F interviews, 5-6 candidates were rejected. 

• This round also had 2 panel members and started with my introduction followed by discussion on my project. 
• After that a lot of DBMS questions were asked including ACID properties, joins, indexing, etc. Now he shared a coding problem- print all the subsets of a given set. First I gave a brute force solution and he asked me to start writing code and told me to worry about optimizations later. But the brute force was a very lengthy solution so I gave the efficient solution as I started writing the code. I was panicking a lot while writing the code. So he told me to only write the pseudo code and explain the approach clearly. 
• After that second interviewer shared a codeshare link which had 3-4 problems written already. First was SQL problem. I did not know SQL and I told him that. He said it was fine and I can move to the next problem. The next one was a linked list problem. I only had to discuss the approach. 
• After that questions on tree traversals were asked. Then I was asked to implement queue using stacks. After this he asked me a lot of OOP questions such as abstract class vs interface, etc and also C++ related questions like use of double pointers, static keyword, etc. After this he asked me some HR questions like career goals, etc in last 4-5 minutes. The second interviewer was really friendly this time.

Round 4: Only 2 candidates made it to this round including myself. This round also had 2 panel members. As per the selection process PDF shared by the company this was supposed to be the HR round. But to my surprise this round turned out be the toughest technical round so far. I felt ambushed :’). I was grilled on my ML project, like I had to explain in great detail each and every function and piece of code written in my project. 

• Then he took a deep dive into Data Structures. Asked me questions regarding types of data structures, how they are arranged in memory, etc. Then he asked about machine learning questions in depth. 
• Then I was asked if I had any work experience or any hard core software development projects, which I did not have. 
• Then second interviewer asked questions from trees, trie, and DBMS questions. This round lasted for about 40 minutes and was toughest of all. After this round the selection list was published and I did not make the cut, only 1 candidate was selected. It turned out that the other guy had several development projects and 4 software development internships. Well deserved candidate for the job NGL.

To sum it up, a good interview experience. I was really happy that I made it to the top two out of 1400. As important as hard-work is, sometimes it’s luck that you need more :’)