Flipkart.com Software Development Engineer II Interview Questions & Reviews

Interviewed Jan 2012 in Bangalore (India) (took 3 days)

I initially had two rounds of telephonic interviews. The questions were based on algo, ds and coding areas like given a singly linked list how do you efficiently determine if that represents a palindrome, heap related questions, designing data structure for LRU cache, one simple dp related question i.e. given a 2-D array in which each cell consists of either 'WATER' or 'LAND' and a cell (say (i,j)), we should print out the continuous stretch of area surrounding this cell containing 'LAND'.

Later i had five onsite interviews:-

Algo/DS Round:
1. Given a node in a binary tree, print all nodes that are k units away from this node i.e. the nodes can be parents, children, sibling etc.
2. Given a boolean expression with n predicates separated by n-1 operators, operator can be either & or | or ^, based on how you group the expression with paranthesis, the value will be evaluated to True or False. Design an algo to count number of such combinations which will evaluate to true.

Coding Round:
Implement LRU Cache. i was given a laptop and was asked to code it in an editor of my choice. Basically, i should be able to write well designed syntactically correct modularcode. I choose to implement this in C++. I managed to come up with a working code this in 45 minutes.

Design Round:

OO Design:
Design Snake and Ladder Game?

DB Design:
Design schema for n-ary tree with each node having information to only certain set of attributes among name, age, address, value etc. Also, table should store hierarchy information i.e. parent child info. Post that, i was asked to write sql queries for:-
a. printing out all parents of a given node (use recursive CTE)
b. printing out all nodes which has exactly two children.

Bar Raiser Round:
Was asked to explain the projects and technologies i worked on. The discussion was based around my problems that i tried to solve. I was given one problem based around the Order Management System and the interviewer asked me to make the search service extensible i.e. say if some new category service like apparel is introduced, then search results should show up these results also along with existing results. So, it required strategy pattern to be implemented.

Hiring Manager:
It was genral discussion based around analytics, tools, ETL frameworks that i worked on.