Software Engineer · Online Assessment · Multiple Types

Intuit — Software Engineer ✅ Passed

Level: Junior-Level

Round: Online Assessment · Type: Multiple Types · Difficulty: 6/10 · Duration: 60 min · Interviewer: Neutral

Topics: String Manipulation, SQL, Bash Scripting, Palindrome

Location: San Francisco Bay Area

Interview date: 2025-11-15

Summary

The online assessment consisted of three parts: a coding question, an SQL question, and a bash scripting question.

Details

I encountered three questions in total.

Part 1: Coding I was given a DNA string dna and was asked to calculate the cost of converting all its substrings into palindromes. The cost is the number of character modifications needed. The final result should be the sum of the cost for all substrings, output as a long integer.

Part 2: SQL I had to write a query against a transactions table to output the following fields: status, total_transactions, total_amount, and failure_reasons. My approach was:

1. Normalize the original reason.
2. Group by status and reason to count occurrences.
3. Use a window function to sort reasons.
4. Use LISTAGG to merge the results, ensuring only two rows remain.

Part 3: Bash I was given a multiline string simulating the output of ls -l, and I needed to find the largest file name. The key was to correctly handle the ls -l column format and file names containing spaces.