Background
I bumped into HackerRank in my first year of college. We all know it’s a platform that helps students and professionals to practice Data Structures and Algorithms questions. Apart from that, people also solve various language-specific problems to develop skills and participate in contests that involve fun coding challenges.
Although the major revenue HackerRank earn from is HackerRank for Work. Which is a solution for remote hiring.
While surfing around on LinkedIn I got to know that HackerRank has a Flagship Internship program that happens twice a year (previously once a year). So when i saw the opening for SDE intern i couldn’t stop myself from applying.
Pre-Interview
Prior to HackerRank I used to work as a Backend Intern at an Awesome startup Dukaan which enables you to open up your own, personalised e-commerce store within minutes. I’ve learned a lot, such as application of OOP in real life, optimising my code or writing good code as we say, reducing latency in APIs, SQL and a lot about PostgreSQL + Django magic.
Apart from this I’ve also been an active open-source contributor in some of the major open-source projects like IntelOwl, won some of the notable hackathons like Hackout and made a lot of projects. And wrote lot of blogs related to Backend and system design.
So my resume was pretty toned up!!!
Rounds Conducted
- Online HackerRank OA Round
- HR (Phone Call)
- Technical Interview — I
- Technical Interview — II
Online HackerRank OA Round:
I applied through their careers website around end of May. And within some weeks i received the Test link on HackerRank itself :D It was a 90 mins test comprising of two coding questions (1 easy, 1 medium) and some MCQs.
I solved all of them before time with all the test cases passing.
HR (Phone call)
After a week of the online OA test i received a call from HR. It was just a casual call where i was asked about my current position, Education and my time commitments etc etc.
This round was to make sure that we are on the same page regarding the requirements and all.
Technial Interview — I
Soon after the HR Phone call i received a mail with a link to schedule interview with a Senior Engineering Manager at HackerRank.
We started with each other’s introduction and then he asked me to walk him through my resume. He Prompted questions based on my projects and why i made certain decisions. Like In one of my projects i was creating Dynamic webhook to capture logs and i made a SDK as well to send logs. He asked me how can i eliminate the use of Webhook and just use SDK.
Then further questions revolved round Publisher-Subscriber model with Redis and RabbitMQ as i have used it in one of my project.
Then later we discussed about load balancer, caching, Database optimisation, scaling the backend and some stuff related to backend. And we even discussed how can we use some of the data structures and algorithms to optimise the backend code and reduce the number of DB query. Glad i wasn’t asked to invert a Binary Tree xD.
Technical Interview — II
After a few days i received another mail from HR stating i have another round with the CTO and Cofounder of HackerRank Hari. This interview revolved around my open source contributions and my previous work at Dukaan and the impact they made. He digged out all of my commits that i made in various open-source projects.
This was a short and sweet round I wasn’t asked any technical questions here, it was all about showcasing my work, projects and interest
And finally after 10–12 days i received the acceptance email and also a meeting scheduled with HR.
TBH i was really anxious for these 10–12 days xD
Internship Perks
Soon after completing my paperwork i received a nice huge box from HackerRank with my joining gift and ofc a New 16 inch Macbook Pro 😀
Later on HackerRank also sent me a 27 inch Monitor, Apple Magic Mouse and Magic Keyboard. And how did i forgot to mention the frequent fully sponsored team offsite in Banglore.
As HackerRank is a remote first company i also received rembirshment for my WFH setup. And Health Insurance. Yes Interns get it as well!!!
I currently work in the platforms team, we build the Backend of the Could IDE which is a part of their professional hiring Product https://www.hackerrank.com/solutions/professional-hiring/
I get to play a lot with Golang, Gin, AWS, AWS Go SDK, Ruby on Rails, Terraform, PostgreSQL etc etc
Pointers
- Yes Yes you had heard it right, HackerRank does not ask DSA. But you should be well versed with your Development skills.
- HackerRank values open-source a lot. So make sure your GitHub graph is green
- Build a project that can be used by other people or something that solves a problem. Don’t just build for the sake of populating your resume.
- It’s totally okay to over- engineer your projects for the sake of learning.
- My resume and experience is Backend oriented and so was my interview. For frontend folks the questions were revolving around frontend itself.
- A general tip for cracking any interview is that to overpower/dominate the interviewer. You should be driving the interview forward not the interviewer. Speak out everything you know about the topic interviewer asked and it’s related topics.
- One thing i’ve noticed is that work at HackerRank is very unique and exciting. You just won’t be building simple APIs rather than that you’ll get your hands dirty with Infra, System Design etc etc
- Work Culture at HackerRank is amazing. People here are very supportive and flexible. And if you are a Joining as an Intern be ready to get ragged for the initial few days in a good manner by your Team Members, HR and all hehehehe.
Keep an eye on https://www.hackerrank.com/careers/ for upcoming opportunities at HackerRank. It’s an fun place to work
Find me on
GitHub: https://github.com/uzaxirr
Twitter: https://twitter.com/uzaxirr
LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/uzaxirr
