Cleartax Interviews

Experience: 2.5 Year
Eduction: Tier 1 College
Current Comapany: Product Based Startup in Banglore
Application Process: HR Reached out

Round 1 - Machine Coding | Ride Booking System

Duration : 90 Minutes (Including Intro, Question Explanation, Running the test cases and explaining the question)

Problem Statement:
We want to build a cab booking platform to allow a rider to book a cab.

1. The platform has decided upon the maximum distance a driver has to travel to pick up a rider.
2. A cab has only 1 driver.
3. Sharing of cab is not allowed between riders
4. The price of the car can vary depending on distance. In the future we might have some other calculation logic.
5. The driver search will be based on distance. Later we can move to some hybrid approach involving rating etc..

Please build an application that exposes the following features to riders and drivers.

1. Register a rider.
2. Register a driver/cab
3. Update a cab's location (x,y)
4. A driver can switch on/off his availability
5. A rider can book a cab
6. Fetch history of all rides taken by a rider.
7. End the Trip

Evaluation criteria:

• Problem Solving
• Code Quality
• Use of Right Abstractions
• Design Patterns
• Data Structures
• Speed of Coding
• Refactoring
• Unit Testing & Code Testability
• Optimized Performance (Error Handling, Logging, Concurrency Management, etc.)

Solution:
Was able to solve all functionality with runnable code, except pricing. Interviewer was satisfied with implementation.

Round 2 - LLD+HLD | Movie Booking System

Problem Statemet:
Functional Requirements
Our ticket booking service should be able to list down different cities where its affiliate cinemas are located.
Once the user selects the city, the service should display the movies released in that particular city.
Once the user selects the movie, the service should display the cinemas running that movie and its available shows.
The user should be able to select the show at a particular cinema and book their tickets.
The service should be able to show the user the seating arrangement of the cinema hall and the user should be able to select multiple seats according to their preference.
The user should be able to distinguish available seats from the booked ones.
Users should be able to put a hold on the seats for five minutes before they make a payment to finalize the booking.
There would be multiple kind of seats - e.g. SIlver, Gold, Platinum etc..

Discussion:
Mostly HLD, no code was expected mainly design diagram, follow up question on scaling and concurrency

Round 3 - Managerial Round | Any Project from current company

Kind of my first managerial managerial interview after college, started discussing one little unique project ignoring other normal projects considering nothing much can be discussed in normal client server project.
However I wasn't able to explain clearly or interviewer wasn't able to understand or both.
I was majorly trying to the cover the core part (flex part) building the context explaining the each componenet one by one, however he was always pulling in other direction, might be because unware of the business internal working. Would have been better if I would have picked some other project, Might be a bad day.

Verdict: Rejected
Learning: KISS (Keep it simple stupid)