SanDisk Firmware Engineer Interview Questions
& Process

The interview process is pretty straightforward. You'll have about 2-3 rounds of technical interviews, and the exact number depends on the team you're interviewing with. All these rounds are technical. The final round might be with the manager. The HR interview is basically a formality; they don't really have a say in whether you get hired. If the manager and the team think you're a good fit, they'll extend an offer. HR only gets involved in negotiating the final salary. Sometimes, managers might also try to convince you to join. If it's for a higher-level position, a Director might even join for a chat.

So there were 2 rounds of phone interviews and 1 on site interview. First, there was a phone screen by the recruiter. Then, I had 2 phone interviews where we went over my projects and they asked some questions about them that related to their work. They also asked some basic embedded systems questions. The on-site interview had 6-7 interviews total, including a lunch interview that was technical. The technical parts involved writing a for loop in assembly, debugging C code, and questions about basics of embedded C, pointer dereferencing, and debugging techniques.

The interview process had 4 rounds in total. The first round was a written test with 3 sections and negative marking (-0.25). Section 1 had 10 aptitude MCQs, similar to RS Agarwal. Section 2 had C programming questions, including MCQs and 2 programming tasks. The MCQs were basic C, and the programming tasks involved printing 'Hello World' with a specific condition and reading a file to search for a string. Section 3 was hardware-focused, which was challenging as my background is in IT. The second round was the first technical interview where I had to explain my project and answer questions about it. I was also asked to write C code to send data bit by bit using GPIO. A simple aptitude question was asked to gauge my thinking process. The third round was the second technical interview. I was asked about the 'volatile' keyword in C, how to declare an array of function pointers, and how interrupts work. The fourth round was an HR interview, where I was asked to share something not on my resume, talk about myself, and discuss previous interview experiences and reasons for rejection.