Sahaj AI Software Interview Experience (On-Campus)

This is my first Interview Experience article, I am so excited to share my experience with you all!
Sahaj AI is a company that really stands out from most of the top IT companies in its requirement process. From the Pre-Placement talk to the final round, you will definitely like it, if you are not that much into DSA-based hiring.
Starting Off, Sahaj AI visited our campus on Sept 11, 2023. They have done a really good Pre-Placement event with doodle art and explained what they are doing, how they are different from others, the process of the recruitment drive, and everything. After that, we went to attend Round 1 of the interview process.
The entire recruitment drive went like this:

Pre-Placement Talk -> Aptitude & Technical MCQ Round-> Coding Round -> Technical Round -> Final Round

Round 1 (Aptitude & Technical MCQ’s):

The spicy thing starts from here. In round 1, we have given MCQs of around 40 which have to be answered within 40 minutes.
The MCQs are from various topics ranging from Data structures, Computer Networks, DBMS, Operating Systems, General Aptitude, and Logical Reasoning.

Tip: Stay cool, answer as much as you can!, don’t waste your time in hard Aptitude questions

The difficulty rating ranges from easy to medium; you can easily clear this round if you are strong in the fundamentals of computer science and general aptitude.
Out of 700+ students, 140+ students got shortlisted for the next round, luckily I was one among them.

Round 2 (Coding Round):

In this round, they won’t ask you to solve Hard DSA problems, they won’t even ask you to solve DSA problems at all.
They have taken a different route here, unlike others, you will be given with boilerplate code of a backend project and you will be asked to complete every operation of the server. It will be really easy if you know the basics of the backend development. The round will last about 2 to 3 hours.
The languages & tech stack allowed are Node with express js, Java/Kotlin with Micronaut, Python with Flask, and Cpp with Crow web library.
I have chosen Node project and asked to complete the api contract of a employee management system. The operations includes creating a employee record for a post request, getting a employee record with the unique id with a get request and searching for a employee with various tags like name and area.
As I have already familiar with web technology concepts, I aced in this round and cleared it easily.
Out of 140+ students, only 6 was shortlisted for the next round.

Round 3 (Technical Round):

In this round, you will be checked for proficiency in the basics of computer science like Data structures and Algorithms, OOPs, DBMS, Computer Networks, Operating Systems.
For me, the panel consisted of well experienced developers of two, they introduced themselves and asked me to introduce. Once it was over, they started assessing my technical knowledge. The interviewer will go as deep as possible to the terms you are using, so be wise in the terms you are using, questions will always asked from where you have just left off. This round lasted for more than 1.5 hrs.
As I have already done a internship at Infosys Springboard being a major MNC in India, they liked it and asked me to explain the project I have done in that Internship.
After that they have given a feature to add to the project that I have completed during my Internship @Infosys, I have clearly implemented that, then they asked me to create a RDBMS for storing all the data in a table.
From the start itself I have followed the normalization rules of designing tables in a RDBMS and split the entire data into 3 tables, then I was asked to write a query to get the data from the 3 tables using joins.
I was totally confused the left outer join and inner join and used the wrong joins, the interviewer stopped and corrected me, its really awkward moment for me to make mistake in a simple join types .
They have satisfied with my knowledge in DBMS, then they asked me to choose either Operating System or Computer Networks, as I confident in Operating System, I chose Operating System.

Then they have asked questions like:

• What is Operating System?
• What are the Operating System you are aware of and how they differ?
• Why Operating System is used ?
• What is a kernel?
• What is a process?
• What is thread?
• What are the CPU scheduling algorithm you know?
• If there are more number of high priority process are already waiting in the queue, CPU time will be given to a low priority process ?
• What are the Disk Scheduling Algorithms you know ?

As I answered all the questions upto their expectations in Operating Systems, they have jumped to Computer Networks, and started questioning:

• I am entering https://google.com in my web browser, what is actually happening back in the scene ? : I replied, the domain name has to resolved to a ip first, so DNS will be queried and then only our browser will communicate to the server directly.
• Will DNS always return same ip address of google.com? : I replied, no load balancing will be used in big infrastructures to distribute the load.
• What is a load balancer ? : I replied: it is a kind of router which can route traffic optimally to maintain our load.
• What is Scaling ?
• What are port numbers you are aware of ?
• Difference between GET and POST HTTP request ?

Use cases of GET & POST

Tip: You have to showcase your skills to be the odd one out, feel free use to use the advanced technical concepts that is not usually covered in normal academic syllabus, so that they will know, you got the stuff.

Out of 6 students, only 4 was shortlisted, by god’s grace I got shortlisted for the next round.

Round 4 (Final Round):

This is the last round in the overall interview process, in this round, they will ask both technical and HR questions, to make sure that you are a good fit for their organization. The interviewer will go as deep as possible to the terms you are using, so be wise in the terms you are using, questions will always asked from where you have just left off. This round lasted for 1hr.

Initially, I was asked to introduce myself and they introduced themselves to me. The questions, I got asked in the round are :

• What are the programming languages you know ?
• Which is your favorite among them and why ?
• Which you will recommend for a absolute beginner and why ?
• How will you implement a Garbage collector to Python?
• What do you know about Sahaj and why do you work for us ?
• What are the things you have learned out of curiosity other than technology related stuff ?
• What is virtualization, assume me as a non-tech person and explain it in simple terms.
• Can I host multiple websites from a single hardware using virtualization and use a single domain name to access it without specifying the port numbers in the url?

Verdict : Selected