Summary
I attended a screening round for a Staff role at Coupang, which involved solving two coding problems on HackerRank. Despite my efforts, I believe I didn't perform well, especially on the first question, and the interviewer seemed uninterested, leading me to expect a rejection.
Full Experience
Hi Folks,
I'm sharing my experience after gaining a lot from this community. I recently attended a screening round for a Staff role at Coupang, specified for BLR / HYD locations, though I'm not sure about the exact team.
The round consisted of a HackerRank link with two problems to be coded within 60 minutes. They emphasized the need for a working solution that passes all test cases.
For the second question, I successfully implemented the LFU cache and it passed all the test cases. However, for the first question, despite significant thought, I could only come up with a binary search solution that failed 3 test cases.
The interviewer seemed quite uninterested throughout our conversation, not even responding to my questions. Based on this interaction, I anticipate the outcome will likely be a rejection. I will provide an update if anything changes.
Interview Questions (2)
Complete the 'findMinBatchSize' function below.
The function is expected to return an INTEGER.
The function accepts following parameters:
- INTEGER_ARRAY dataSamples
- INTEGER maxBatches
A machine learning training pipeline processes data in batches to optimize graphics processing unit (GPU) utilization. Several users contribute data samples, and the pipeline divides them into batches of a specific size.
All data must be processed.
Multiple users' data cannot be combined for processing.
The number of batches across all users cannot exceed a limit.
Determine the minimum batch size.
Example 1
Input: dataSamples = [1, 5, 7], maxBatches = 8
Output: 2
Implement an LFU (Least Frequently Used) cache.
Summary
I interviewed for a Staff (L6-2) position at Coupang USA, which eventually led to a verbal offer for an L6-1 role after a follow-up system design round. Unfortunately, the written offer was rescinded due to H1 transfer policy changes.
Full Experience
I went through an interview process with Coupang USA for a Staff (L6-2) position. The process involved a phone screen followed by a full onsite loop and a subsequent follow-up system design round.
Phone Screen (60 mins)
- Two behavioral questions.
- One standard coding question, followed by an in-depth discussion on its system design aspects, including scalability for a fleet of servers.
Onsite Interview
Bar Raiser Round
This round was an in-depth conversation about my experience, project design discussions, and several behavioral questions. The interviewer was quite thorough, really grilling me on my answers. I learned the importance of thinking carefully before speaking and being ready for extensive follow-ups. I received a Strong Hire for this round.
First Coding Round
I faced two behavioral questions and one standard coding question: 'Sort Colors'. The interviewer had a specific preference for a one-pass solution without using a map, even though my initial approach had the same time and space complexity. This felt a bit unusual, as it seemed to test memorization rather than problem-solving. I was rated a Weak Hire for this round.
Hiring Manager Round
Similar to the Bar Raiser round, this involved standard behavioral questions like 'What is the hardest project you've done?', 'What was your role?', and 'How do you resolve conflicts?'. This interview ended quite quickly. My background and highlighted project were research-based, focusing on building an MVP, while the hiring manager and bar raiser seemed to be looking for typical distributed systems experience with challenges around scale. I explicitly mentioned my project lacked these, having mostly non-technical challenges which I tried to frame for a 'Staff' level. The hiring manager realized the mismatch and ended the coding discussion within 15 minutes, with the remaining time spent chitchatting. Despite this, I received a Strong Hire.
Second Coding Round
This round included two behavioral questions and two coding problems. The first question involved finding the minimum connections to join networks of friends represented by a grid, which I solved with a simple BFS. With 15 minutes remaining, the interviewer presented another problem: given a grid of 1s and 0s, find the number of distinct shapes. For example, a provided grid example returned 2 for an 'L' shape and an inverted 'L' shape. I received a Strong Hire.
System Design Round
I also had two behavioral questions in this round. The main task was to design a ride-sharing app like Uber. Although the question seemed straightforward, the interviewer expected much more depth than I provided. Looking back, I believe my communication wasn't strong enough, and my answers lacked conviction. I was quite disappointed with my performance here and received a No / Weak Hire for L6-2.
After these rounds, the recruiter informed me that the feedback was mixed, with my weak hire in coding and the system design round being flagged. They wanted a follow-up on System Design.
Follow-up System Design
This round also began with two behavioral questions. The problem given was to design a blob storage service similar to S3. I hadn't encountered such a problem before, so it was challenging. However, the interviewer was very helpful, course-correcting me when I took wrong paths. It felt like a truly collaborative session. We discussed DynamoDB extensively, including its replication and partitioning mechanisms. While it was a good learning experience, I ultimately did not meet the Staff (L6-2) bar. However, I received a Strong Hire for L6-1.
The recruiter reached out shortly after to confirm if I was open to relocating to Seattle, and once I approved, they gave me a verbal offer for the L6-1 position. Just before our call to discuss the official offer, the recruiter mentioned that Coupang had paused all offers requiring H1 transfer due to a government shutdown and uncertainty around a 100K fee. This was unfortunate, as I never received the written offer letter, despite the numbers being very good for Seattle.
Overall, the recruiter and interviewers were pleasant to work with. However, the last-minute rescinding of the offer left a sour taste, especially since no other companies I interviewed with cited this reason. I suspect there might have been other underlying reasons the recruiter didn't share.
Interview Questions (5)
Given an array nums with n objects colored red, white, or blue, sort them in-place so that objects of the same color are adjacent, with the colors in the order red, white, and blue. I was specifically asked to code this in one pass without using a map.
Given networks of two friends represented by a grid, find the minimum number of connections required to join these distinct networks into a single connected component. This problem can be solved using a simple Breadth-First Search (BFS).
Given a grid consisting of 0s (water) and 1s (land), find the number of distinct shapes of islands. Two islands are considered the same shape if one can be translated to match the other. For example, in the grid [[1,0,0,0,1,1],[1,1,0,0,0,1],[0,0,0,0,1,0],[0,0,0,0,1,1]], there are 2 distinct shapes: an 'L' shape on the top left and an inverted 'L' on the top right.
Design a ride-sharing application similar to Uber. The interviewer expected significant depth in the design, covering aspects such as user and driver management, matching algorithms, real-time location tracking, fare calculation, notification systems, scalability, and reliability.
Design a highly available and scalable blob storage service similar to Amazon S3. The discussion involved topics like distributed file systems, data replication strategies, partitioning mechanisms, consistency models, and fault tolerance. We specifically delved into concepts like DynamoDB, its replication, and partitioning mechanisms as part of the solution.
Summary
I recently had a phone screening interview with Coupang for a Staff Software Engineer position in Bangalore. The interview primarily focused on an algorithmic problem involving finding the distance between the two closest islands in a grid.
Full Experience
I am currently a Staff Software Engineer at Walmart with 6.5 years of experience. I recently went through a Phone Screening round for a Staff Software Engineer role with Coupang's Rocket Growth Team in Bangalore. The interview lasted 60 minutes and was centered around a specific data structures and algorithms problem.
Interview Questions (1)
Given a grid[][] containing 0s and 1s, where '0' represents water and '1' represents the land. Given that an island is a group of land (1s) surrounded by water (0s) on all sides.
The task is to find the distance between the two closest islands such that:
- Distance between two islands is the minimum number of '0' between two islands.
- Only 4 - directional movement is allowed.
- There are at least 2 islands present in the grid.
Input: grid =
{{1, 1, 0, 1, 1},
{1, 1, 0, 0, 0},
{0, 0, 0, 0, 0},
{0, 0, 1, 1, 1}}
Output: 1
Explanation: There are three islands present in the grid.
Nearest pair of islands have only 1 zero (bolded in input grid) in between them.
Input: grid =
{{1, 0, 0, 0, 1},
{1, 1, 0, 0, 0},
{0, 0, 0, 0, 0},
{0, 0, 1, 1, 1}}
Output: 2
Explanation: There are three islands present in the grid.
Nearest pair of islands have 2 zeroes in between them (depicted by bold 0 in input grid).
In this case there are multiple pair of islands having a distance of 2 between them.
Summary
I had my first coding round for a Staff position at Coupang. The interview focused on designing a data structure to manage string counts and efficiently retrieve strings with minimum and maximum counts.
Full Experience
I had my first coding round for a Staff position at Coupang. It was a 1-hour coding question conducted on an online code pairing platform. The interviewer expected an optimal working code. The problem asked me to design a data structure to store the count of strings, with the ability to efficiently return strings with minimum and maximum counts. Specifically, I needed to implement inc(String key), dec(String key), getMaxKey(), and getMinKey(), all targeting an average O(1) time complexity.
Interview Questions (1)
Design a data structure to store the count of strings with the ability to return the strings with minimum and maximum counts.
Implement the class:
inc(String key)- Increments the count of the string key by 1dec(String key)- Decrements the count of the string key by 1getMaxKey()- Returns one of the keys with the maximal countgetMinKey()- Returns one of the keys with the minimum count
Summary
I recently interviewed at Coupang and was presented with LeetCode problem 296, Best Meeting Point, as a coding challenge.
Full Experience
During my interview process with Coupang, the primary focus was a coding task. I was presented with LeetCode problem 296, known as 'Best Meeting Point', and had to work through its solution.
Interview Questions (1)
Summary
I recently completed a 60-minute phone screening for an SSE role at Coupang Bangalore, where I discussed a space-optimized Minimum Stack implementation, though the interviewer seemed to expect a different approach.
Full Experience
I'm currently an SSE at Walmart with 6 years of experience. I recently had a phone screening for Coupang in Bangalore. The interview lasted 60 minutes, and my interviewer was from Korea. We discussed the implementation of a Minimum Stack in O(1) time. I tried explaining my space-optimized approach without an auxiliary stack, but it seemed the interviewer was looking for a solution that used one. I'm not sure if he fully understood my method, and I regret not clarifying his preferred implementation beforehand. I'll update this thread with the outcome.
Interview Questions (1)
Implement a data structure for a Minimum Stack where all operations (push, pop, top, getMin) should execute in O(1) time complexity.
Summary
I interviewed for a Staff Engineer position at Coupang, which included coding rounds focused on file system implementation and a system design round for an e-commerce product tracking service, along with a managerial discussion.
Full Experience
- Coding round 1: Could not remember the actual question but it was related to identifying trees in a graph.
- Coding round 2: Given an interface for file system(Similar to 1166. Design File System), implement the following methods
- Create Directory
- Create File with content
- If file is not present, create file with that content
- Else append the content to existing file
- Cat File
- List immediate files in a directory lexicographically
- System design: Design service for tracking products ordered through e-commerce. Products could be delivered across countries with multiple stops across in origin and destination countries with different modes of transport. Order delivery would be handled by multiple third party vendors. To the end user we need to show the current status and location history of the delivery.
- Managerial round: Discussion about past projects and some behavioiral questions.
Interview Questions (2)
Given an interface for a file system (similar to LeetCode 1166. Design File System), implement the following methods:
- Create Directory
- Create File with content (if file is not present, create it with that content; else, append the content to the existing file)
- Cat File
- List immediate files in a directory lexicographically
Design a service for tracking products ordered through e-commerce. Products could be delivered across countries with multiple stops across in origin and destination countries with different modes of transport. Order delivery would be handled by multiple third-party vendors. To the end user, the system needs to show the current status and location history of the delivery.
Summary
I recently interviewed for a Senior Software Engineer (L5) position at Coupang's Bangalore office and successfully cleared all four rounds, receiving an offer.
Full Experience
Hey folks, recently I have interviewed for Coupang (Bangalore Office) for Senior Software Engineer (L5). Briefly about me -
YOE: 4 Current Company: Big Tech Area: Backend
The round of interviews were structured as follows - total 4 rounds: 2 coding rounds, 1 LLD / HLD round, 1 Behavioural
Round 1 (Coding/DSA Round)
Q: You have a source pattern and a target string, figure out how many ways you could get the source pattern in the target string as a subsequence if you cannot take consecutive characters (PS: loosely worded but hope the example below makes sense). Example:Source: abc Target: abbccc
Answer - 2 (abbccc, abbccc)
Expectation - you should be able to write down a working solution for this. DFS + Memoization was expected.
Round 2 (Behavioural)
This is taken by the director of engineering in their teams and is valued quite a lot, prepare their leadership princples well.Q1: Tell me about a time when you had to solve a problem when there were multiple solutions to this. Q2: Tell me about a time when you had to take a hard decision in your engineering process.
Round 3 (LLD/HLD)
Q: Create a UML diagram / list out the entities and APIs that you'd need to create a Book shop.Functional Requirements:
- You should be able to search for books with title and authors. (Note: The company may require you to keep this extendible to support more items like paper bags, copies, stationary etc.)
- You should be able to search your own purchases.
- You should be able to keep track of inventories and items.
- You should be able to handle payments.
NFRs:
- Take care of availablity.
- Keep the stock inventory strongly consistent.
Round 4 (DSA Round)
Easiest round imo, they required working solutions of -- Counter clockwise version of spiral matrix.
- Diagonal traversal of matrix LC-498.
I have cleared all the rounds and received an offer, May luck be in your favour if you're interviewing with them fellow comrade :D
Interview Questions (6)
You have a source pattern and a target string, figure out how many ways you could get the source pattern in the target string as a subsequence if you cannot take consecutive characters (PS: loosely worded but hope the example below makes sense). Example:
Source: abc Target: abbccc
Answer - 2 (abbccc, abbccc)
Tell me about a time when you had to solve a problem when there were multiple solutions to this.
Tell me about a time when you had to take a hard decision in your engineering process.
Create a UML diagram / list out the entities and APIs that you'd need to create a Book shop.
Functional Requirements:
- You should be able to search for books with title and authors. (Note: The company may require you to keep this extendible to support more items like paper bags, copies, stationary etc.)
- You should be able to search your own purchases.
- You should be able to keep track of inventories and items.
- You should be able to handle payments.
NFRs:
- Take care of availablity.
- Keep the stock inventory strongly consistent.