How to apply
This article is my upGrad SDE2 Interview Experience. I applied from a job posting on LinkedIn where there was an SDE 2 opening in upGrad.
Interview Process
There were a total of 4 interviews for the SDE2 role. The first 2 rounds are taken by Barraiser, which is an third party interview service provider. In short, to save the time of upGrad or the company who has job openings, first ask Barraiser to conduct screening rounds and if the candidate clears the round then the candidate gives interview the actual upGrad employees. And last 2 rounds are taken by the upgrad Employees.
Rounds
Following are the details for each round:
Round 1: DS Algo
First round was an Data Structures and Algorithm round taken by a person from Barraiser. Total time for this round was 1 hr. There were 2 questions that were asked.
First was related to BFS, similar to the Number of Islands question with some modification.
Second question was related to DP, similar to this question from leetcode: Jumps
Round 2: LLD and some HLD concepts
Third round was HLD round taken by someone from Barraiser. Total time 1hr.
First question was to design an applciation like mFine. I was asked to first list down all the features that would be needed. Than write pseudo logic for a particular feature.
Than some questions related to CAP theorem, scaling applications and multithreading.
Round 3: HLD round
An upGrad Lead conducted the third round, which was the High-Level Design (HLD) round. The total time for this round was 1 hour. The questions delved deeply into the design of a personal cache service, exploring each concept of how and why certain elements are utilized.
Then had a discussion over internals of Redis and Memcached.
NOTE: The task did not require creating diagrams but only involved sharing thoughts and listing them down in a text editor.
Round 4: Technical Managerial Round
Director of Engineering of upGrad took the fourth round. Total time was 1 hr. Interview started with what my experiences are, what system I have worked with. Than he asked me to enhance my own system which I worked on previous company and than asked questions around that. In the end discussed on multithreading and scalability concepts.
Conclusion
Interviewers from upGrad were knowledgeable and they asked good questions. Overall the whole interview process took 1 week, I cleared the interview but the offer letter came around 1 month after due the some HR issues. Overall interview difficulty was Medium.
You can read more blogs related to System design and Interview Experiences here.
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