Concentric Ai Interviews

On Friday, I had my on-campus interview of Concentric AI who had come for an SDE role in Bangalore, India, offering 6-months internship + FTE. We might have to work with GenAI depending on the project that is assigned. Nevetheless, I'm here to talk about my interview experience. It was pretty rounded interview and you needed knowledge of all domains required for SDE-1 level interviews to actually get through it.

1. Online Assessment (OA):

• 1.5 hours to solve 2 DSA questions along with a SQL query problem. Other than that, we had few MCQs on the OOPs in JAVA as well. I don't remember the questions exactly.
• I don't remember the questions exactly. I solved the SQL, 1 DSA question and the MCQs.
• The question that I wasn't able to solve was of trees. It was something like we had a tree with positive and negative values. We have to remove some (possible zero) nodes along with their entire subtree such that the sum of values of the remaining tree - k*X is maximized where k is a fixed constant given in the question and X is the number of nodes removed. I tried a approach but it gave an error as I failed the implementation in the short time.

2. Interview R1:

• My OA was decent enough to get me shortlisted. 24 students were shortlisted for the first round of the interviews, B.Tech. and M.Tech. combined.
• The first round went extremely great and I was able to answer all the questions that were asked from me. They varied from basic C++ questions, DSA, CN basics and OS basics, including some HR questions towards the end of the interview.
• First of all they asked me why I want to be a software developer. Then they asked me my favourite language. When I said C++, they asked me what data structures are used to store the objects in C++. As I answered stacks for static data and heaps for dynamic data, they asked to explain the working of the two.
• Upon explaining the basic working of stacks and heaps, they asked me the data structures used for the implementation of a heap in C++. I told them that AVL trees or RB trees are used to make priority_queues or heaps in C++.
• Then they asked me to implement a heap using any data structure of my choice. I used a tree data structure (BST to be specific) to implement the push(), pop() and peek() functions of a heap. The discussion went on for more than 30 minutes and the interviewer was pretty helpful if I missed something.
• They were pretty satisfied by my performance so far and asked me some basic CN questions like IPv4 vs IPv6, need of IPv6, Subnetting and Subnet Mask.
• After that they asked me a single OS question of paging and virtual memory of how we can run a 200GB game on my 8GB RAM.
• After answering all these technical questions, they asked me some HR questions like the co-curricular stuff I did in the institute and my future expectations and goals.

3. Interview R2:

• After a long first round (1H+), the second round was pretty small in comparison and they tried to touch upon the topics that weren't covered in the first round.
• We discussed my project and its working in details. Then they asked me implement my project's basic functioning at a LLD level.
• The interview was short but detailed.

It was a surreal experience to finally make it after more one year of daily grind and countless nights of self-doubt and tension of what lies ahead. I've 5 months of carefree time to enjoy the remaining of college life now. Excited for the beginning of the new chapter of my life!