My interview experience @Swiggy! | Backend intern | Offcampus 2024
I hope you’re doing amazing. I’m Omkar Anabathula, and today, through this writing, I intend to share my interview experience for Swiggy Backend Engineer Intern (Offcampus).
How I got this opportunity?
I exactly don’t remember when I applied for this opportunity, but around that time I was aggressively applying for multiple openings. I got a test link for Backend Engineer Intern role at Hackerrank platform around 20th March 2024.
Number of Rounds — 3
Round 1 — OA (65 mins)
Round 2 — DSA based round (1 hr)
Round 3 — Hiring Managerial round (1 hr)
Round 1
There were total 4 questions and the time limit was just 65 minutes. The first 2 questions were of leetcode easy-medium level. I got stuck at 3rd (A variation of knapsack) for quite a while so instead I jumped to 4th (Constructive Math but tricky). At the end, I was able to solve 3/4 questions.
After a week, I mailed the HR highlighting my performance and asked updates regarding the results. Within 2–3 days I recieved call from HR for scheduling my interview round. I was asked to prepare for specific topics like apache spark, RDD, Machine Learning & pyspark.
Round 2
The interviewer was a SDE-2 at Swiggy. I was presented with a code and was asked what was wrong with this code. I took some time and was able to figure out that it was code to “Find whether a binary tree is symmetric around its axis”. I did a dry run in my notebook and suggested a few changes here and there. Got a bit stuck at the edge cases, but was able to get through it at the end. Then I was asked another implementation for the same solution. I wrote a recursive solution for the same and the interviewer was convinced.
Towards the end, I was asked a complex query to be written in pyspark and was allowed to use web/chatgpt for syntax. I wrote the query in sql and asked chatgpt to convert it. Then I was asked to write another query refering to the earlier syntax.
Round 3 (Hiring Managerial)
This was the round where I was drilled the most on my internships and projects. He started with asking me about my internships, in one of my internship we used firebaseDB, he asked why not mongoDB or dynamoDB and many such similar questions. The same happened with projects as well after which he gave me a scenario and asked how would I approach it. It was kind of a HLD question where I had to suggest approaches how to decrease latency in the response of API requests. I explained a few approaches like Load Balancing, increasing servers, CDN and caching. He followed them with what,how & why for each approach. Towards the end he asked some HR questions like why Swiggy and where do I see myself in 5 years,etc.
He also asked why I shouldn’t be hired. I answered it in a diplomatic manner & he liked it :).
Within 2–3 days, I received call from HR that I was selected 🥂🥳 !!
Here are a few tips to follow during the interview:
- Always keep your camera on and greet the interviewer politely.
- Don’t waste time by giving long introductions during technical rounds.
- Before starting the interview, I asked the interviewer the number of questions they planned to ask me so that I could decide on my pace for each question.
- Always dry run your approach with examples in order to explain interviewer.
- Always discuss your approach with interviewer before writing the code and see if they are aligned. While writing the code, keep explaining what that line is doing and add as many comments as possible in the code. Keep your code modular, have meaningful variable name.
- Ask for hints if stuck, don’t waste too much time on thinking.
A few closing notes:
- I don’t think the result was just the outcome of my 2 weeks of preparation. I feel all my hard work done during college & internship time has paid off.
- Don’t be afraid to ask for clarification or assistance during interviews.
Resources:
- Striver’s Sheet : Striver SDE Sheet
- HLD Playlist : Concepts & Coding
- Leetcode : https://leetcode.com
