I was interviewed for the position of Senior Software Engineer/Associate Consultant role at ZS Associates recently. The entire process took around 50 days. There were 3 rounds in total.
Round 1 (Online DSA/Algo Round) – 1-hour duration: There were two programming questions.
- Find a kth largest element in a list without using sorting.
- Find the Longest Palindromic Subsequence in a given input string
Round 2 (Case Study Round): So, for some reason, they call this round the case study round, where typically they ask you one Programming question, one question related to API, and one question related to DB. But, in my case, these questions were asked:
- Brief Introduction
- Given a list, write a list comprehension to generate a list that only has even numbers present in the original input list.
- Explain the difference between Multi-level and Multiple Inheritance in Python. Write examples for both to show how they work.
- Explain the Request-Response Cycle in Django
- Difference between Stateless and Stateful Protocol.
- Difference between PUT and PATCH
- I was then given three tables – Product, Customer, and Order and asked to perform certain queries on top of it.
Round 3 (Managerial Round):
- Brief Introduction about myself and the technologies that I have worked on
- Explanation of the project that I am currently working on.
- What is the most significant project that you have worked on recently (preferably totally on your own)
- When I answered the previous question, the interviewer was not fully satisfied with the outcome I got, and asked me to think about adding some unique features to my solution. I thought about it and suggested some possibilities which totally convinced me (Basically he was looking for some out-of-the-box thinking there, which he mentioned towards the end)
- I was asked about two strengths of mine that would help me succeed at ZS. When I mentioned those, he asked me to sum them up in one adjective each.
- I was then asked about my family background – like how many members, what they all do, where I come from, etc.
- What do you think you are getting at ZS that you are not getting at your current organization?
Once all these interviews were done, I got a confirmation from their HR on the 5th day from then and was awarded the selection confirmation.
I hope this article can be of help to people who are looking to interview for similar positions. All the best, you got this!