Susquehanna International Group Software Engineer Interview Questions
& Process

Had an online assessment first, then an HR behavioral chat. After that, a live technical coding interview, and finally, there were 2 onsite rounds. The first onsite was a low-level design one, and the second was behavioral. The technical part was pretty relaxed, and the final rounds had 2 engineers for the design part and 2 managers for the behavioral part.

I went for a C# SWE role, I have 4 years of experience. A recruiter hit me up on LinkedIn. First, I talked to the recruiter, then had a 90-minute technical interview over Zoom, followed by a 3-hour technical interview also on Zoom. The recruiter called me back after the technical rounds. All the coding was done on CodeSignal. It was a bit unusual; instead of staying on the call, they let you leave for 30 minutes after explaining the problem to implement the solution, and then they'd come back to review it. They always ask a lot of follow-up questions about optimizing and adapting the solution to different scenarios. The first technical round involved a movie catalog search problem. They provided objects and started with a list, and the task was to improve it using hash map indexing. There were some follow-up questions about caching, and this round was relatively easy. The second round was tougher and split into two parts. Part 1 was a trie problem, which is quite challenging to solve in 30 minutes unless you're well-practiced; you need to implement building and searching a trie. The interviewer attempted to assist, but the code snippets they provided didn't work, making recovery impossible. It was ironic that the interviewer couldn't solve their own question. I think failing this part is why I was rejected. Part 2 was more of a pseudocode design session with a different interviewer who stayed on the call the entire time. They wanted me to create an order book for stock asks and bids. We spent the whole time discussing different data structures for high-speed searching, focusing on optimization for various factors like binary search, tries, min heaps, and hash maps, along with pointers. We discussed the Big O notation for each data structure. Out of the three engineers I spoke with, only one was actually on the team I applied for, which made it difficult to get accurate information since the teams operate independently. Additionally, taking three hours out of a workday is always inconvenient.

My application for an internship last year included an online assessment, and I was then invited for a phone screen for the graduate position. The interview process was well-organized, friendly, and transparent, with everyone I interacted with being very helpful. The phone screening focused on basic motivation and interest questions. Following that, I had a 90-minute technical interview that was well-structured and involved typical technical questions like DSA and explaining trade-offs. Finally, I went for an onsite interview which included a 60-minute software design session and another 60-minute manager interview.