Nomura Software Engineer Interview Questions
& Process

A principal software engineer will mostly conduct the interview. I encountered a very rude interviewer who asked only one question. They deliberately present multiple scenarios that challenge your initial answer. However, stick to your original answer because these scenarios are designed to break it, but they might invalidate base cases which are unlikely in good coding standards. Based on your response, they won't explain the reasoning behind the edge case points they aim to convey.

The interview process is a multi-step practice companies use to screen and hire new employees. The different stages and requirements involved can vary a lot depending on the industry, position, and company. The main stages are: Introductions, Light conversation, Professional pitch, Behavioral questions, Technical questions, and Closing. The interviewer usually greets you with a handshake and makes introductions. Next, they might try to make a personal connection to gauge your interpersonal skills. Then, they'll ask about your professional background and experience. After that, they'll ask behavioral questions to see how you'd react in certain situations. Finally, they'll ask technical questions to assess your job knowledge.

Nomura Holdings came to our campus in July 2019 for a Software Developer intern role. The whole process started with a Pen and Paper test. After that, there were 2 Tech Rounds and a final HR round. The Aptitude Test was a pen and paper thing with 60 questions to do in 60 mins. The questions were easy but you really had to watch the clock. It had verbal, quantitative, and logical questions. RS Agarwal book is enough for this. Out of 120 students, only 15 made it to the next steps. In Tech Round 1, the interviewer first asked me to introduce myself. Then he looked at my resume and asked about my projects, digging deep into the frontend, backend, and database tech I used. He also asked if I used APIs and had me draw the project's flow. After that, we talked DBMS, like normalization, and he threw in some SQL queries. Since I put Java on my resume, he asked about OOP concepts. I got to ask him a couple of questions at the end. This round took about 35 minutes. Tech Round 2 started with me walking through my resume again. He asked about other projects the first interviewer missed and how I'd pitch my project to a big company. Then came Java questions, where I had to explain OOP concepts with examples and write pseudocode. He also asked about method overloading and overriding using real-world examples. We also covered 'this', 'super', 'final' keywords, and exception handling in Java. This round was a bit shorter, around 20-25 minutes. The HR Round was mostly a formality. He asked me to go over my resume again, and then asked about my family and where I live. It lasted about 10-15 minutes. They announced the results the same day, and 6 of us got selected.