OPTUM Interview Experience for FSE (On-Campus) 2023

Optum came to our campus in September to interview candidates for the position of Software Engineer – Full Stack Engineer. The procedure was completed in three stages: (1 written test, 1 Technical Interview, and 1 HR interview). CSE, IT, ECE, and EEE were the qualified branches with a 7+ CGPA. The entire procedure was carried out online.

Round 1 ( Written Test ): This test was conducted on the HirePro platform. There is a total of 50 questions (1 coding +49 MCQs). Both technical and non-technical questions are included.

• Non-technical verbal, logical, and aptitude questions with an easy level to difficulty were asked.
• The technical component that followed contained MCQs on computer science topics such as computer networks, DBMS, OS, DSA, C, and Java. One simple code question made up the final segment.

Coding question: Find the longest palindromic subsequence’s length in s.

A subsequence is a sequence that can be derived from another sequence by deleting some or no elements without changing the order of the remaining elements.

 Input: s = "bbbab"
 Output: 4

Explanation: One possible longest palindromic subsequence is “bbbb”.

The coding question has the highest priority to select this round. Out of maybe 500+ students who attempted the test, only 121 got shortlisted for the next round.

Round 2 (Technical Interview): I got the link here to interview one day beforehand of the scheduled time. My interview was done through the HirePro site.

• My interviewer thoroughly focused on the content of my resume during the interview. The interviewer gave a short introduction of himself and asked me to do the same. I did, and he inquired about my projects briefly.
  I stated in my introduction that I’m from an ECE background.
• When the interviewer inquired about my projects, I gave a detailed explanation of both my hardware and software efforts. We asked about projects for over 20 minutes (why this project? what other reasons did you have for taking it on? why are you implementing this piece of hardware? which software have you used in your project?, etc.).
• When the interviewer asked which language I was most familiar with, I quickly said Python and C. After asking a few fundamental programming questions in Python, such as whether palindrome or not and whether prime numbers exist or not, the interviewer then told me to construct the same code in C.
• The later interviewer asked two easy questions to code in python which uses a list and a dictionary. I solved them and some technical questions on C (arrays, pointers, dynamic memory allocation, structures,…) and python ( lists, tuples, dictionaries, sets, strings).
•  The interviewer asked me to write a binary search program and explain it with real-time examples. Then I explained it using a real-time English dictionary in which alphabets are in ascending order from A to Z .if I want to search for a word starting with R then I need to search the second half of the dictionary after N to till Z similarly to get R we need not search from N to Z we can search in between N to T  in this approach I explained it.
• Then he asked me what technologies I am comfortable then I replied with HTML, CSS, IoT, and SQL. then he started asking questions on it and replied to every answer very confidently.
• Then he asked a question related to e-commerce. I tried for 1min finally I didn’t get it then the interviewer told it’s not a big thing.
• Then he said that he is done with the interview and asked if I had anything to ask, and I asked him a question and the interview concluded.  
• It was scheduled for 45 mins and it took 1 hour 15min to complete but the interviewer finally told i have a lot of questions to ask you but it is out of time. The next min after the interview I felt very happy that I answered all the questions confidently. I got confident that I will be selected for the next round at that moment.
• Then the next day I received an SMS from superset stating that I got shortlisted for the next round. Then I received a mail from the college regarding this. And after waiting for a few minutes, I got the confirmation for the next round in the superset profile.

Round 3: (HR Interview): For this round, out of 121 students, 61 got shortlisted this round was just a formality they had to finish and they took everyone who got shortlisted for the HR round.

Tips:

• Start improving your coding skills on several platforms.
• Codechef, Codeforces, Spoj, Leetcode, Interviewbit, and Hackerrank are sites for practicing coding.
  edx and Coursera courses are preferred for learning.
• Be confident; I smiled the entire time I was in the interview and I looked relaxed.
• Mention your participation in the extracurricular activities offered at your college. In my case, I pointed out that I am the mathletes club coordinator at my institution and I discussed how I managed events throughout pandemic scenarios and how I enhanced my communication and planning skills.