Interview experience

Goldcast · Software Engineer · Mid-Level

Community-sourced A factual summary of an interview experience shared publicly outside interviewd.

Sep 28

In Progress

Overall Experience

The SDE 2 process included an online assessment, low-level design, coding, management, and logic questions. The post records concrete tasks from each stage.

5 rounds

Posted by interviewd

Interview Process (5 rounds)

Round 1 of 5: Online Assessment

60 min

Question 1

Medium

Solve Number of Islands.

LeetCode equivalent

Experience

The assessment included the named problem; the candidate’s approach and result were not stated.

Question 2

Medium

In a circular array of player energy values, choose a starting index. A ball advances one position to the right each second and drains 1 energy from every player it touches. Maximize the time until it lands on a player whose energy has reached zero.

Experience

The objective is to choose the start that maximizes elapsed seconds before reaching a drained player. No solution or constraints were supplied.

60 min

Question 1

Medium

Design a notification dispatch system for a SaaS platform that sends email, SMS, and push notifications through third-party providers such as SendGrid and Twilio. Address user preferences, retries, rate limits, audit logging, adding channels, and concurrency.

Experience

The prompt required a low-level design for the multi-channel dispatch system and its listed concerns.

60 min

Question 1

Medium

Restore IP Addresses.

LeetCode equivalent

Experience

The post names this problem but does not provide the candidate’s approach or result.

Question 2

Medium

Movement of Robots.

LeetCode equivalent

Experience

The post names this problem but does not provide the candidate’s approach or result.

60 min

Question 1

Medium

Discuss key learning challenges from your work experience, then draw a high-level architecture.

Experience

The management round covered learning challenges and requested a high-level architecture; the project or system was not specified.

60 min

Question 1

Medium

Five pirates ranked A through E must divide 100 coins. The senior pirate proposes a distribution and all vote; at least half the votes are needed to pass. If it fails, the proposer dies and the next pirate proposes. Each pirate prioritizes survival, then gold, then prefers others dead. What proposal should be made?

Experience

Reason through the voting incentives and propose a split under the stated preferences.

Question 2

Medium

Three boxes contain only apples, only oranges, or a mix, but every label is wrong. By drawing one fruit from one box of your choice, determine how to relabel all three boxes.

Experience

Choose a box and use the observed fruit to infer the contents of all boxes.

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