Autodesk Interviews

📞 Round 0 — Recruiter Screening

My journey started with a brief phone call with the recruiter. We discussed my salary expectations, the role's fit with my background, and some general background information. It was a smooth and straightforward conversation, after which I received an email to schedule my first technical round, which I set for a week later.

🧑‍💻 Round 1 — Coding (CoderPad, 1 hour, 2 interviewers)

This round began with approximately 20 minutes of discussion about my current role, projects I've worked on, challenges I faced, and decisions I made. Following that, we moved on to two coding questions:

• Question 1: A classic LeetCode medium-level stack problem. I solved this quite quickly, in about 10 minutes.
• Question 2: I was asked to imagine a simple filesystem structure composed of 'boxes-within-boxes'. I implemented an iterative solution efficiently. The interviewer then prompted me to improve upon it and consider a recursive approach, but we ran out of time as they wanted to delve into more resume-project related questions.

The final 15 minutes were again dedicated to project discussions. A week later, after a follow-up, I heard back that I had cleared Round 1.

🏛️ Round 2 — System Design & Coding (60 mins, 3 interviewers)

This round had a well-structured flow:

• Resume Q&A (10 mins): A few questions about my experience and the projects I had listed.
• System Design Portion (30 mins): The discussion revolved around two main areas:
  1. How I would design and scale a hypothetical system.
  2. How I would build a specific system on AWS, detailing which AWS components I would use and my rationale.
• Coding (CoderPad, 15 mins): We returned to coding with two questions, both building upon the filesystem problem from Round 1:
  • Question 1: A variation of the Round 1, Question 2, which could be solved iteratively.
  • Question 2: A slight extension of the previous question. These became quite straightforward once I applied my understanding of recursion and tree traversal. The interviewers were very helpful throughout this section.

I completed this round on a Friday, and the following Monday, I received an email inquiring about my availability for the Hiring Manager round.

👥 Round 3 — Behavioural + Hiring Manager (45 mins)

This was a very conversational round. We discussed various aspects:

• Team culture and dynamics.
• My approach to collaboration.
• My decision-making style.
• A few specific questions about my most recent projects.
• How the team operates internally.

There were no tricky questions; the focus was purely on assessing cultural and team fit. I left with a really positive impression of the team. The very next day, the recruiter reached out to inform me that an offer would be extended.

I recently had the opportunity to interview with Autodesk for the Software Development Engineer 1 role. The entire interview process took about a month to complete and consisted of three rounds: two technical interviews and one with a hiring manager.

In Round 1, the discussion started with fundamental concepts of OOPS, SOLID principles, and some specific Java-related questions. I also talked about the projects I had worked on at my previous company. This round included two DSA problems. The first was a relatively easy, standard LeetCode problem where I had to break a given sentence into individual words, handling various edge cases. For instance, 'Tommy is good dog' should yield 'Tommy', 'is', 'good', 'dog'. I was asked to run my code locally against test cases provided by the interviewer. The second problem involved reading data from a CSV file and performing some analysis. I wasn't very familiar with CSV file reading in C++, but the interviewer was very supportive and allowed me to use Google for syntax.

Round 2 was quite interactive and covered a mix of topics. I faced several behavioral questions and also discussed theoretical questions related to JavaScript and React. We delved into my previous projects again. A specific technical task in this round was to flatten an array in JavaScript, with the constraint of using only a for loop. I had a good discussion with the interviewer throughout this round.

Finally, Round 3 was primarily a behavioral round where I had to explain some of my previous work in full technical detail. The interviewer also provided a comprehensive overview of the role itself and what working at Autodesk entails.

My interview experience for the Software Development Engineer 1 position at Autodesk involved a comprehensive technical discussion.

The conversation started with an in-depth dive into my resume and past technical experiences. I was asked about my migration experience, specifically the learnings and challenges I faced while moving code from Node.js to Spring Boot. Following this, the interviewer inquired about the deployment lifecycle, and I explained the CI/CD process I was familiar with from my time at Chubb.

We then moved on to core computer science concepts, where I had to explain different types of sorting algorithms and provide an implementation example, such as Bubble Sort.

Several system design and problem-solving scenarios were presented. One question involved a caching scenario: how to refresh or update the cache if the response contract changes but old values are still present. Another challenge was about efficiently searching through millions of records, where I discussed techniques like indexing, caching, and distributed search.

I also shared my knowledge on application optimization techniques, covering database queries, caching strategies, asynchronous processing, and scaling methods. The discussion touched upon handling sudden traffic spikes, where I talked about solutions like load balancing, autoscaling, and queues. Finally, I explained the CAP Theorem, detailing consistency, availability, and partition tolerance with examples.

The interview concluded with a deep dive into my previous projects, discussing the design choices I made, the challenges I encountered, and how I resolved them.

Despite a thorough technical discussion, I received a rejection. The reason provided was that another candidate had already completed the interview process earlier.