Newfold Digital (Endurance International Group) Interview Experience for Operations Engineer (On-Campus) 2023

Final-year Engineering Student from a Tier 3 college

Location: Bengaluru, India

Branch: Information Science Engineering

I was selected as an Operations Engineer by Newfold Digital (formerly Endurance International Group). They specialize in web hosting, cloud technology, online marketing, security, and application delivery, serving small to medium-sized businesses globally. Newfold Digital is also the parent company of BlueHost.

Newfold Digital visited our campus virtually on August 16th and 17th, 2023. DesignThe process spanned two days: August 16th featured the MCQ and coding rounds, along with the first technical interview. On August 17th, I had the second technical interview and the HR interview.

DAY 1

Round 1: MCQ Test [60 Minutes]

Topics: Computer Networks, Operating Systems, Object-Oriented Concepts, Linux commands and operations, System Design and Architecture.

Please be cautious while answering, as there is a negative marking system in place.

Half of the students were eliminated during this round.

Round 2: Coding Test [60 Minutes]

Platform: HackerEarth

Three questions in total:

Difficulty Level: Moderate to High.

• Two coding questions based on Strings.

String Minimization

1. Task: Minimize the length of a string (S) consisting of ‘a, ‘b’, and ‘c’.
2. Operation: Split the string into two non-empty parts and append the left part to the right part.
3. Special Rule: While appending, remove matching characters from the boundaries of the appended portions.
4. Objective: Find the shortest possible resulting string length.

Cyclic Shift

1. Input:

• Integer N represented as a 16-bit binary.
• Integer ‘m’ represents the number of positions to shift.
• Character ‘c’ can be either ‘L’ for a left shift or ‘R’ for right shift.
• Task: Determine the number ‘M’ generated after cyclically shifting the binary representation of N by ‘m’ positions, based on the direction specified by ‘c’ (‘L’ for left, ‘R’ for right).

One SQL query question

Basic SQL query which involved the use of DISTINCT, GROUP BY and NOT IN operators.

Round 3: Technical Interview -1 [30-90 Minutes]

Format: Online Interview

Interviewer panel: One interviewer.

Only 30 candidates made it to this round out of nearly 850.

Pilot question: Begun with a self-introduction followed by questions based on your resume.

Key Focus:

Fundamental concepts of Operating Systems:

1. Process life cycle, Deadlock, and its recovery
2. What is MBR? What is init? and what is its priority
3. Change in modes and file ownership
4. Default file permissions
5. Stages of Linux booting process, including where BIOS is stored.

Computer Networks:

1. Explain all layers in the OSI model and your understanding of these layers.
2. HTTP status codes and their meaning, encryption and decryption techniques, and various protocols at different layers.
3. Security assessment of a particular website.
4. CDN, ARP, RARP, and various networking protocols.
5. Common ports, such as SMTP use port 25.
6. Use cases of TCP and UDP.

Database Management Systems (DBMS):

1. Joins, DDL, DML, TCL, schema, anomalies
2. Concurrency control, backup, and recovery
3. SQL and NoSQL differences, followed by a stepwise explanation of the normalization process.

Scenario based question :

1. What happens when you type https://www.xyz.com.

The interviewer expected a detailed response, starting from DNS and browser cache to Routing Protocols and TCP 3-way Handshake. This alone took about 20 minutes.

DSA:

1. Differences between Procedure Oriented Programming and Object-Oriented Programming,
2. Friend functions and virtual functions.
3. Various data structures and their real-life applications were discussed.
4. You were asked to write Pseudocode for a problem statement, followed by a Dry Run for the same.
5. Problem Statement: Design a data structure that functions like an LRU Cache.
6. There were also inquiries about various aspects of Computer architecture.

DAY 2

Round 4: Technical Interview- 2 [90 Minutes]

Format: In-depth Interview

Interviewers: Two senior interviewers, each with over 10 years of experience.

Only six candidates advanced to this round

This round proved to be more challenging than the previous one. The initial part of this interview concentrated on the skills highlighted in the resume. Subsequent questions were asked accordingly. I provided a detailed explanation of my projects, followed by thorough questioning by the interviewer regarding the technologies used, available alternatives, and implementation methods.

The topics covered included:

Computer Networks:

1. TCP/IP model and its layers
2. DNS servers and their types,
3. Differences between HTTP and HTTPS, SSL, and TLS
4. Routing, subnetting, number of host bits, network bits, useful IP addresses, and broadcast addresses.
5. IPv4, IPv6, CIDR, classful addressing,
6. TCP and UDP use cases and drawbacks.
7. HTTP Request-Response cycle.

Operating Systems:

1. Paging, caching, deadlock
2. Multithreading, multitasking
3. Race conditions, semaphores
4. Modular, Monolithic, Microkernel approaches
5. Process states, daemons, and zombie processes.

Linux:

1. Features, kernel operations
2. Fork exe, grep
3. Netstat, ns-lookup, top, free, and all commands related to networking.

Also, questions were posed about the solutions submitted in the previous coding round. The inquiry covered aspects like the approach taken, data structures used, time complexities, and optimization capabilities of the code.

Real-life scenarios were presented, and innovative, feasible solutions were expected for each situation.

System Design:

1. The interviewer asked how I would handle a large-scale influx of traffic on a website. The interviewer expected me to discuss Load balancing, Vertical and Horizontal Scaling, Caching, Databases, and Backup servers.
2. If a website’s servers are remotely located and experience high loading times due to a massive number of hits, how would I resolve this scenario and reduce buffering time?

Probable solutions discussed included CDN, Caching, and proxy servers.

The interviewer displayed the screen and inquired about the Linux ‘top’ and ‘free’ commands, including the attributes they showed.

In the end, only one student successfully cleared this round.

Round 5: HR Interview [30-45 Minutes]

Interviewers: Two HR interviewers.

Objective: This stage aims to familiarize the interviewers with the candidate.

Standard HR questions were posed, about the strengths, weaknesses, and family background.

If you reach the HR round, you’ll likely receive an offer.

Questions were along the lines of :

1. What do you know about the company and the job role?
2. A scenario was presented to assess if one can take responsibility and ownership if something goes wrong and rectify the situation.
3. What does happiness mean to you?
4. Most noteworthy achievement.

During this phase, the HR team aimed to assess the candidate’s understanding of the role and their knowledge about the company.

Additionally, candidates were presented with behavioral questions that placed them in hypothetical and uncomfortable situations. The answers provided were expected to outline the course of action taken to address the scenario.

Within the next hour, the results were announced, and I was offered the role of Operations Engineer at Newfold Digital.

Preparation Tips and Interview Strategies:

• Solidify Core Concepts: OOPS, DBMS, CN, and OS concepts are an absolute must for every interview, direct your efforts into learning these thoroughly

• Do not feel dejected if you fail to clear any round. Sometimes, LUCK plays a huge role. Despite giving your best shot, there’s a chance you might still not end up getting selected. So, keep your chin up and think of every failure as a stepping stone toward success. Experience in this round might help you ace it next time around.

• Avoid bluffing during interviews. Be honest with the interviewer. They possess more extensive knowledge than us and will eventually identify any gaps in our understanding. Giving vague irrelevant information will likely lead to a chain of related questions.

• Interviews often last a while, so bring a water bottle and feel free to ask any number of questions.

• The opening question decides the length of the interview, whether it’s a 10-minute chat or an hour-long discussion. Make a strong first impression. Generally, the opening question is about the most notable project of yours. Ensure you choose the appropriate project – for instance, if the role is for a developer, discussing a hardware project might not match the company’s needs.

• Stay confident throughout the interview. Above all, keep a smile on at all times. Do not drop your confidence if you are unable to answer. Make an effort to find the answer afterward.

• Research the company and the specific role that you are interviewing for and gather some statistics and facts about the company. At the end of the interview pose questions about the role, technologies used, or anything about the job.

I wish you All the very best, in all your Future Endeavors. !!!