Red Hat intern interview experience!!!
Did I get selected? Read it till the end to know :)
Hey, so starting with who I am? I’m a final year B.Tech CSE student passing out in 2021 and like most final-year students, I was also looking for some 6-month internship or full-time opportunities. Then, one day I saw a LinkedIn post by Vidhya Raghunath ma’am(Principal TA Red Hat, so now you know whom to contact) regarding Red Hat hiring software engineering interns.
Then, I also submitted my resume and luckily got the mail for an online coding challenge. You can consider this as the 1st round. In this, there were 2 coding problems and 5 MCQs. One coding question was a pretty easy Adhoc problem and the other was based on Dynamic Programming. If I have to scale them through general Competitive Coding platforms, I would say the questions’ level was Leetcode easy to medium. So, If you practice regularly on Leetcode, you will easily qualify. MCQs were based on Data Structures, time complexity, aptitude & reasoning.
After 3–4 days, I got the result for the previous round, that I’m shortlisted and require to tell the earliest slot possible for the technical interview. I love technical interviews, as it teaches a lot of things, boosts your confidence, you get to interact with some cool engineers and you get a self-analysis of your performance too. In the technical interview, there were 2 interviewers, both were software engineers at Red Hat. Technical interviews are very dynamic in nature as it totally depends on what you had mentioned in your resume, your projects, & interests. So, the interviewer started with the introduction, then moved to what work experience I have in terms of past internship, Open-Source contributions, and tech stack I have worked with. Then he asked some general interview questions based on DBMS, databases like PostgreSQL, MongoDB, etc. He also asked a few things in Operating System. Finally, at the end of the interview, he asked me a question based on Matrices and then asked me to implement(to code on online IDE) Binary Search Tree, few questions on optimization and time complexity.
After that interview, I was very happy with my performance so somewhere I knew that I’ll get the call for the next round and so did it happen. The next round was a very interesting one, you may call it the managerial round as this round was taken by 2 very senior people at Red Hat. Unfortunately only one wasn’t able to take the interview in the 1st managerial round that’s why I had 2 managerial rounds but generally the process includes only one MR. This round is to see if you are a good fit for their company or not, do you understand their work culture or not, and discuss about you. They asked if I’m aware of some products at Red Hat or not. The good thing was I had used and explored some of the Red Hat products in the past so the discussion went very well. In the end, they explained to me that if I get selected on which team I’ll be working on and how it will be for the next 6 months.
Then, after 1 week I got the results that I’m selected. I was thrilled because in Red Hat you get to work on the latest top-notch technologies and the way Red Hat supports open-source is outstanding so what could have been better than this. I have joined now as an intern in the Developer Engineering team now.
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