[ INFO ]category: Behavioral · Onsite difficulty: difficult freq: first seen: 2021-05-17
[DIFFICULT][ONSITE]OnsiteSWE III (Senior)Rejected
$catproblem.md
I interviewed for a Software Engineer 3 position at PayPal in . The interview process consisted of five rounds:
Round 1: HackerRank test with two medium-level questions from LeetCode.
Round 2: Technical Round 1. The interviewer asked three questions:
Find a number in an array and discuss different ways to find it. I discussed binary search, linear search, and using a Set data structure.
Find the longest repeating substring in a string. For example, in the string "abcdijkijkastabcduast", the answer is "abcd".
Round 3: Technical Round 2 (Onsite). This round was conducted by someone from the US and included three coding questions:
Find the kth largest element in an array. This question can be found on LeetCode.
Find the intersection of two lists. Discuss the complexity for both sorted and unsorted lists.
String compression question. For example, the input "aabbbcdde" should output "a2b3cd2e". This is a famous question on LeetCode.
Round 4: Design Round (LLD and HLD). The interviewer asked me to design a parking lot system with multiple floors, online booking, and support for multiple vehicles. I was also asked to discuss scalability and database architecture.
Round 5: Hiring Manager Round. This round was more like a machine coding round than a managerial round. The interviewer gave me a Spring Boot application and asked me to create two endpoints for getting an employee ID from the database and saving an employee to the database. The employee object had several optional and mandatory fields. I was able to complete the task within 30-40 minutes, but the interviewer seemed unsatisfied with my answer. He mentioned that he was expecting to see design patterns, exception handling, and idempotency handling in the code.
I received a rejection email from the recruiter but did not get feedback on the last round. I was disappointed that there was no feedback provided, as it would have been helpful to understand where I could improve.
Note: All technical interview rounds required me to write full production-ready code in an editor.