Chopper Trading Software Engineer Interview Questions
& Process

Recruiter submitted my profile to Chopper after I applied through Dice. Chopper then had me complete a questionnaire about my experience with C++, Tools, Libraries, and development platforms. This was followed by a 30-minute technical phone screening with the team leader, where I was asked to explain how to implement a multi-threaded message queue using the boost thread library. Soon after, I was invited for an on-site interview. The on-site involved a two-hour, face-to-face session with the team lead and two engineers. During this, the team lead presented some simple C code on a whiteboard and asked me to identify potential issues like memory leaks, bad exceptions, uninitialized memory, and unexpected pointer deletion. One engineer focused on assessing my personality to see if I'd be a good fit for the team. The other engineer asked me to write a recursive function on the whiteboard to compute Fibonacci numbers with O(n^2) complexity, and then requested a linear time alternative.

A recruiter reached out to me, and I mentioned I was open to good opportunities even though I was happy with my current situation. My resume was submitted, and then I had to complete a self-evaluation regarding C++, Linux/Windows, Boost, etc. The first part of the phone interview involved typical programming questions like the difference between hashmap and binary tree, UDP vs. TCP, OOP, and polymorphism. The second part had two programming problems. For the first, I had to find character frequencies in a character stream, and I provided an O(NLogN) solution using a binary tree, which was accepted. Then, a variation with doubles (0.001 precision) was given, and I came up with an O(N) solution. For the second problem, merging K sorted collections of N elements each into one sorted collection, I initially proposed an O(KLogK*K*N) solution. The interviewer wasn't satisfied and hinted at more efficient sorting algorithms. I then developed an O(logK*K*N) approach where sorting happens only once initially, and then elements are picked and inserted. I explained my steps, but he cut me off, insisting sorting would be needed multiple times and dismissed my idea. I chose not to argue, deciding the role wasn't worth the effort, especially given his dismissive attitude.

HR reached out to me on Dice.com. The process included a skills test, several onsite 1:1s, and then we moved to negotiations really fast. Some details were missing and dealing with HR was a drag. Contract details were messed up. The background check took forever, like over 2 weeks, and I was left hanging. Questions about before I started weren't answered, and I didn't feel supported overall.