Urban Company Software Engineer Interview Questions
& Process

The interview had 3 rounds. First was an online assessment where I had to solve 3 questions in 1.5 hours. The second round was a technical interview where they asked 2 DSA questions, one hard and one medium, both related to strings. The hard one involved Trie Data Structure.

The interview process started with an OA on hackearth, which had 3 questions. The first was like a leetcode medium with constructive algorithms, which I solved. The second was a leetcode hard/cp medium with segment tree/BIT, which I also solved. The third was a leetcode med-hard/cp medium with trees/dfs; I got the approach but didn't get an AC. Each round began with 'tell me about yourself'. Round 1 was with a software engineer, really chill. He asked about my projects from my resume. Then he gave a leetcode easy question. I first gave a brute force O(n2) and then an O(n) solution. He suggested some further optimizations, and I improved it, and he mentioned an even better approach. He then asked me to write the code on paper, which I did. After that, he gave a cp-medium graph question involving topological sorting. I explained the approach on paper and then coded it up, which he liked. We also chatted about my favorite programming language and I asked him some company questions. Round 2 was focused on LLD. The interviewer asked for a low-level design of a startup and whether I preferred a whiteboard or laptop; I chose whiteboard. It was mostly a discussion where she challenged my approach if I was off track. I tried to use OOP and SOLID principles. She then had me draw class diagrams on paper. I wrapped up by asking some general questions. Round 3 was a mix of HR and Technical. It started with introductions. I explained my projects and internship. Then, he presented a real-world problem that initially seemed like logical reasoning but actually required an algorithmic approach, specifically dynamic programming. He asked for the DP transitions, and I wrote the DP state and transitions on the whiteboard, calculating the TC as O(n*m^2). He was okay with it but hinted at optimization. I then suggested using binary search to optimize the TC to O(n*m log m), which satisfied him. He then asked some general questions about UC, and I asked my questions.

I applied on LinkedIn for a Software Engineer II position with 2 years and 4 months of experience and got a recruiter call. The first round was a 1-hour coding test on Hackerearth with 3 questions. I had to check if a number's binary representation had a 01 or 10 pattern, solve a strategic warehouse problem, and find the largest sub-number. I passed Q1 and Q2 and moved on. The second round was a DS and Algo interview on Google Meet. They asked me to implement deques, find the smallest missing positive number in an unsorted array, and determine the least common ancestor for both BST and BT. I managed to solve all of them and advanced. The third round was a system design interview on Google Meet. The prompt was to create a workflow management platform allowing users to define tasks, schedules, and dependencies. Tasks could run in parallel or sequentially, with error handling and retries. It needed to support data passing between tasks and scale for 1000 concurrent workflows. We discussed the database schema and implementation details. I designed the system, confirming requirements with the interviewer. The discussion and implementation took an hour. The panel's feedback was that I was slow and my experience wasn't relevant.