Nvidia Interview | Set 3 (On Campus)

I had a campus interview of Nvidia Software profile for their infrastructure team at Bangalore and here is my experience.

Written Test

15 questions on C/C++ that dealt with Bit manipulations, C++ concepts, Virtual functions, abstract classes, output programs, extern variables, Compilation errors etc.

Around 10 questions on Data structures that had questions from sorting, heaps, and other concepts of DS.

Around 8 questions on OS that included questions on semaphores, TLB, threads, process scheduling etc.

8 questions on analytical ability that included a few quantitative puzzles and some logical reasoning.

Overall the level of questions were good as all of them made us think.

20 students were shortlisted for interviews. I had topped this list 😉

Interviews were conducted by 2 separate teams. Each team interviewed a candidate at most once.

Round 1:
Before entering the room they had analyzed my CV.
1) Why are your grades low in the first few sems? I explained that I did a few projects that diverted my focus from academics.
2) They noticed that I had published a paper in electronics so they asked me to explain in depth the work done for it.
3) Questions on a few more projects.
4) Find the 3/4th node in a linked list.
5) Which of the following sorting algorithms uses the least number of swap operations. a. Heapsort b. Selection sort c. Quicksort d. Insertion sort
I had answered this question incorrectly in my written test so had to find the correct solution in front of them.
6) Memory map of a C program.
7) Concepts of C++ like Virtual functions, Inheritance, Constructors, static variables etc.
8) How are virtual functions actually implemented. Ans- Virtual pointer table
9) Given two different processes wanting to read each others variables that were defined in their source code. How can we implement that?
10) Do you want to go for higher education?
11) I was asked that even though I had a strong hardware profile why was I interested in NVIDIA software. I replied that both of my skillsets were strong and would be put to good use at NVIDIA which works on both of them.
11) A few more DS questions that I don’t remember.

I was shortlist for the second round

Round 2:
This was taken by a senior engineer
1) Tell me about yourself. I tried to show them that I am passionate for NVIDIA.
2) What is NVIDIA CUDA? I was asked this as I had mentioned it in my resume.
3) Write a sample program in CUDA. I wrote a reduce function to sum an array.
4) How do we synchronize threads in CUDA?
5) Find output of a given program which had static variables in recursion.
6) I had mentioned that I simulated multi-planetary orbits in a project and interviewer looked particularly interested in it so I was asked questions about ellipses, their foci. radius and eccentricity.
7) Explain how virtual functions works by writing a sample program.
8) What are virtual destructors? (I had no idea)
9) Give an example of runtime polymorphism in C++. I said we can achieve this using function pointers. Not sure if correct.