ZoloStays Interview Experience | On Campus for SDE-1

ZoloStays conducted recruitment drive at MNIT Jaipur for SDE-1.

Round 1 (Online Coding Round on Xobin ):

Question 1 –

Find sum of product of all pairs in an array 

Question 2 – 

Given number k (total topics) and one array of length 7 integers denoting the number of topics which the person will be able to cover on the particular day of the week. 

A[0] will be for MONDAY, A[1] will be for TUESDAY and so on…. Print the day of the week on which he will complete the syllabus.

Question 3 –

N = Total pokemon,  A = array of length N where A[i], the number of obstacles destroyed by the i th pokemon

Find the position after the end of the contest for each of N pokemon in the same order as they appear in the input.

I am unable to recall the 4th question but it was some algo based problem. Total time limit was 45 minutes only. I think, those who completed more than 3 questions (with good projects in their resume) were selected for the next round. Total 9 candidates were shortlisted for the next round. 

Round 2 (Skype Technical Round):

We were already informed that next rounds will be of only 30 minutes. 

Interviewer started with intro and tell me about yourself. Then he asked me to solve an array coding problem with any programming language. I was unable to code it properly but I explained the algo and my approach clearly. Interviewer was friendly. I explained the possible corner cases.  Then a few behavioural questions as where do i see myself in the next 5 years? What are my goals? 

Then he asked me if I have any questions. I asked about the tech stack that ZoloStays is using now. One of my web project was hosted on MNIT VM. So I asked, if I access it through direct IP address using MNIT network, it is faster then through domain. He explained me the possible scenario.

4 Students were shortlisted for the next round. I was one of them.

Round 3 (Skype Technical Round):

Interviewer started with tell me something about yourself. He had my resume and he started with my most recent project ( It was Placement portal for MNIT Jaipur that I built in the summer break using MEAN stack technology. I am the placement coordinator of CS branch also in my college ). He started with tech stack and asked me a few questions about NodeJs & how it is different from PHP. As this project is live at (http://placements.mnit.ac.in) and students are using it so he asked me about how did you host it & few DNS questions. What are the functionalities in placement portal ? He asked me to explain one click apply functionality in detail. How did you design the architecture of your project? And some questions about my other projects.

He asked me if I have any questions as we were running out of time. I asked him how can I scale the placement portal and 100% CPU utilization. It was a good discussion with him on scaling a web application.

Only 1 student was selected for the next round and hopefully it was me.

Round 4 ( Telephonic Round with Senior Developer ) :

He asked me to introduce myself. Then asked me to explain one of my projects completely.  Then he asked me questions about MEAN stack ( Mongodb + ExpressJs + Angularjs + Nodejs ) & web technologies as most of my project were full stack web projects.

1. Explain map, filter, reduce in Javascript
2. How node.js works, event loop in node.js 
3. What happens when we type www.facebook.com in browser (https://medium.com/@maneesha.wijesinghe1/what-happens-when-you-type-an-url-in-the-browser-and-press-enter-bb0aa2449c1a)
4. Suppose we type www.google.com and the server sends back the html file in response. Explain how browser is able to show it to us.
5. Aggregation 
6. Few Angularjs questions
7. How lazy loading in a web page works
8. What is the use of CDN ( content delivery network )? What are the benefits and disadvantages ?
9. A web page is taking 5 seconds to load. What are the possible ways to reduce the loading time (both at the server side and client side) ? 
10. How will you scale your website to handle more requests 
11. Explain browser side and server side caching 

Then he asked if I have any questions. I asked –

1. ZoloStays has promo code feature in their website. Every promo code has so many conditions to check and user expects a super quick response. How this feature is implemented ?
2. How can I scale MEAN project by improving my server side code ?

Result – Rejected