The interview process was pretty smooth - I got a call on a Thursday for a round of interviews on the following Saturday, it was a little too soon but I didn't ask to postpone even though they were willing to. There was a lot of waiting around for the interviewers to show up and finish with other candidates and I had to wait 2 hours before my first interview took place. Normally it would've been annoying, but it actually helped calm my nerves :). There were 3 technical rounds on the day - 2 based on data structures and algorithms, and 1 round with the hiring manager. All rounds were promotion based, if you dont do well in one, you dont go forward. Most of the questions asked were right out of careercup. I struggled a bit in some of the questions, but the interviewers were very helpful and were solving the problem along with me. I'm listing the questions I remember from each round
Questions in round 1:
1. Given a NxN matrix, find all possible paths to a location (i,i). You can navigate only downwards and towards the right.
2. Given an large list of unsorted numbers, find the smallest number. You can access the list only 3 numbers at a time, and keep moving forward 1 number at a time. (otherwise called the sliding window problem?)
3. Traverse an n-ary tree in preorder (or something similar).
There was another one but I dont remember it - it had to do with tree-sort of some kind using a binary tree.
Questions in round 2:
1. Find the kth number from the end of a linked list.
2. How would you determine if there is a cycle in a linked list?
3. What would happen if you used two pivots instead of 1 in quicksort? Derive complexity.
4. How do you guarantee a good pivot is always found for quicksort?
5. Find the kth smallest number in an unsorted array with minimum complexity.
6. Find the longest length palindrome in a string.
Questions in round 3:
1. About yourself
2. About your work.
3. Challenges faced.
4. Significant contributions.
5. In depth explanation of threading/lock management in Java and its relevance to a Singleton pattern.
6. Some more basic Java questions.
After the first 3 rounds, there was an interview with a senior engineer from the Seattle office a couple of days later. It was a design round, the problem itself was simple and only a low level design was expected. Other questions were related to significant contributions in current project, challenges faced, and what would I have done differently in hindsight?
There was a final high level design round. Also asked were significant contributions, etc.
