Urban Company (Formerly UrbanClap) visited our campus in November 2021 for the SDE-1 role. The recruitment process began with a Pre-Placement Talk by the SVP of Engineering and VP of Product, followed by four rounds: one coding test and three interviews, each lasting one hour.
Round 1: Coding Test
The coding test comprised three questions of medium to hard difficulty to be solved within 1.5 hours. I managed to solve two questions and progressed to further rounds.
Round 2: Interview 1 (LLD)
Conducted by an SDE-II, this round involved designing a task manager capable of adding new tasks and deleting the least frequent ones. The question resembled an LRU cache problem, and I implemented it using OOPs and set data structures.
Round 3: Interview 2 (LLD)
This round was taken by a Software Engineering Manager. Interviewer asked me to design an app for driverless cab booking. Requirements and features were given by the interviewer. I was supposed to give a logical overview of working, which class to be implemented and what would be the data members and member functions of each class. It was quite a complex round and I had never practiced these types of questions before. The important thing was to be a little creative and discuss all your ideas with your interviewer so that he/she can guide you while going forward.
Round 4: Interview 3 (Managerial Round)
This round was taken by the VP of Engineering. Initially, I was asked the questions about my resume (Internship & one project based on computer vision) for the first half time. In later half, interviewer asked one DSA question: https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/given-two-unsorted-arrays-find-pairs-whose-sum-x/amp/This question was furthur extended for 3, 4 and 5 arrays. Finally, I was asked to generalise the solution for ‘k’ arrays.
Verdict:
I got the offer for SDE-1 on Day 0. Honestly, I enjoyed the interview process. At all points, I felt as if I were in a meeting with interviewers to design new products for the company. And the interviewers also were very friendly and made me at ease. All the other companies interviewed based on DSA but interviewing UC was altogether a different experience.
My learning and suggestions:
- You need to be strong at DSA which is absolutely essential.
- Try to build 1-2 unique projects to showcase your skills and be prepared for any question based on the projects.
- Take at least 10 mock interviews on sites such as Interviewbit, Pramp & Leetcode.
- Practice thinking out loud at an interview.
- Finally, be confident and positive before going to the interview. Think of an interview as a discussion and not an exam.