De Shaw Interviews

I recently took the Online Assessment for DE Shaw, and honestly, the questions were quite intimidating. I was presented with two distinct problems that required a strong grasp of algorithms and data structures. It was a tough experience overall.

College - Tier 1 IIIT Stipend - 2L per month Eligibility - 7+ CGPA

There was an Online Assesment round followed by 2 rounds of interview.

Online Assesment

There were 3 sections in the OA -

1. DSA - 3 problems i. Standard implementation based problem ii. https://codeforces.com/contest/1927/problem/G iii. https://codeforces.com/problemset/problem/1861/E
2. Subject based MCQs
3. Aptitude MCQs

I was able to solve 1.7/3 DSA problems and subject mcqs were also fairly simple. Aptitude MCQs were very hard given that we had around 30 mins for 15 mcqs.

Interview

Around 30 students were shortlisted and interviews were scheduled offline. This round lasted for about 1.5 hours which consisted of questions of both DSA and Subjects. The round started with normal introduction, and then we straight away jumped to the first dsa problem.

Implement insert, delete and getRandom methods of Randomized Set is O(1)

• https://leetcode.com/problems/insert-delete-getrandom-o1/

I was able to provide a solution and then the interviewer asked a follow up that if we insert duplicate elements, how can I improve my solution. I still provided him with an explanation and he seemed satisfied with it.

Then we moved on to the CS Subjects Section of the interview. First the interviewer asks me to explain abstract classes and then gave a problem to implement using abstract class.

Then he asked some standard subject questions -

1. What is Polymorphism?
2. Explain types of Polymorphism?
3. What is deadlock? What are the conditions for deadlock
4. What do you mean by indexing in DBMS? Explain the types of indexing

Finally he asked me a Design related question.

Design a database in the form of a Java Class and implement the functionality
to set data types, add primary key and configure the auto increment feature.

Ex - 
Student s = new Student(...)
This should create a new database table s.

I provided some solution by implmenting some features in the constructor and adding the auto increment in a seperate method. I had some discussion with the interviewer on what exactly he wanted, but he seemed somewhat satisifed.

I was informed by the Placement Committee that I was rejected after this round.

Yoe : 3+

Current : SDE2 at indian ecom company

TC : 34

OA : 2 questions

1st Question was somewhat related to https://leetcode.com/problems/painting-the-walls/ . Solved this completely.

2nd Question was related to some combinatorics question(it was very hard for me) , did a simple brute force to pass 4-5 test cases.

Code Pair 1 :

Started with formal intro, discussed a bit about tech stack and stuff. Then started off with the DSA questions. Buy and Sell Stock - 2 & 3. Expectation was to explain and run the cases. Did well in this round.

Code Pair 2 :

After a very detailed intro , given a DSA question. I don't remember the exact question but it was related to knapsack dp. Then I was given a multithreading question , was supposed to give a sudo code and discuss things around multithreading, I have not worked with concurrency but did a coursework in my masters so I remember few things. This round went well.

Design :

Given a task to design browser history. Had a good 40 mins discussion then moved to a different problem altogether. It was related to handling trade informations, worked a bunch of things related to handling , relying , replay and types of message deliveries. This round went well.

LLD round :

Chat Application , with atleast 5 follow ups. Multithreading coding question. Did well in first half but was unable to run the multithreading one. Wrote a runnable code(with some syntax error), was able to discuss few aspects around it.

Verdict : Reject

I performed fairly well in all the interviews. I already had an offer in hand, which I transparently communicated to the DE Shaw recruiter. At the time, I was quite inclined towards that offer. So, when the recruiter asked about my compensation expectations from DE Shaw, I quoted a figure close to the highest band they've offered in recent times. In hindsight, I believe that might have been the turning point where things didn't align.

DE Shaw SDE Interview Experience – Cracked it (Sept 2024 – Jan 2025)

Education: B.Tech in CSE
Years of Experience: 1year 6 months (at the time of initial interview)

After what felt like a mini UPSC journey with debugging instead of essays, I’m thrilled to share that I finally cracked the DE Shaw SDE interview and received an offer! Here's a light-hearted (but honest) take on the whole ride:

🎯 Coding Round (Sept 2024)

HR slid into the inbox with an opening for SDE, asked for my resume, and boom—a HackerRank link appeared like a boss level in a game.

Contents of this boss battle:

• 3 medium DSA problems
• 10 MCQs on math & probability (because who doesn’t love random number fun?)
• 10 MCQs on CS fundamentals (the classic CPU-meme material)

🕵️‍♂️ Screening Round – Round 1 (Sept 2024)

• DSA: Solved Binary Tree Cameras — yes, trees again
• System Design: Had a low-level design discussion on Stack Overflow — ironically, without actually looking it up on Stack Overflow 👀

🧠 Tech Onsite – Round 2 (Oct 2024)

DSA:

• Maximize Score of Numbers in Ranges
• Given a string and an integer k, return the lexicographically smallest string after at most k deletions.

CS Fundamentals:

• Difference between primary and alternate keys
• Is function overloading/overriding possible in Java main()?
• Encapsulation vs Abstraction

SQL: Given a history table with columns (userLoginId, location, loginTime), write a query to fetch the first login time per userLoginId (note: IDs can repeat).

• What is method hiding? (Hint: It’s not magic, it’s just static.)
• What are macros in C++? (Answer: The preprocessor’s version of ‘YOLO’.)

🧩 Tech Onsite – Round 3 (Oct 2024)

• DSA: Count inversions where arr[i] >= 2 * arr[j], i < j
• OOP: Composition vs Inheritance — or why has-a sometimes beats is-a
• System Design: Low-level design of Google Classroom (teachers, students, subjects)
• Project discussion based on resume

👨‍💼 Hiring Manager Round (Nov 2024)

Welcome to the final boss fight. This was the most challenging and in-depth round:

• Resume walkthrough, discussion on full-time and internship projects
• SQL: Query for A-B table difference

DBMS:

• What is isolation in DBMS? How is it handled at the application level?
• Indexing strategies, B-Tree vs B+Tree, why not AVL?

OS: Scheduling strategies, optimal approaches

• 32-bit vs 64-bit CPUs

DSA:

• Good chips / bad chips problem (CLRS)– proposed O(n²), was expected to optimize further

Behavioral:

• A typical day at work
• A time when I handled a critical problem collaboratively
• Why DE Shaw? (Because it’s awesome. And also... please hire me :p)

📣 Result (Dec 2024)

Received the offer letter! Felt like finally unlocking the legendary loot box.

📞 Offer Call (Jan 2025)

Final formalities, discussions, and yes, finally, celebration.

Hackerrank Code pair interview Software Engineer/Senior Member, Tech (Application Engineering).

Questions

• Introduction, challenging task you have done, why DE SHAW.
• CI/CD, diff b/w containers and VM, revert deployments for bad release
• Easy LC Problem - 1413
• hooks, custom hooks, hocs
• perf optimisation techniques
• Time & Space complexities
• react question - add to card functionality, render data to table and create fn to add products to cart and show the cart in cart page
• db normalisation, process vs threads

Interviewer was very chill but the interview seemed very fast paced could have been two rounds.

Had a weird round with De Shaw. HR told me it will be a DS algo round but it didn't feel like it. Interviewer didn't wrote or paste any question. Everything happened verbally.

My interview journey for the Software Development Engineer (SMTS) role at DE Shaw, Hyderabad, India, began with an online assessment. After clearing that, I faced four challenging interview rounds.

The first two rounds were highly technical, diving deep into data structures, algorithms, distributed systems, and networking concepts. Round 3 involved a managerial discussion, which also covered advanced Python memory management, financial application design, and probability. Finally, I had a techno-managerial discussion in Round 4, touching upon options pricing and agile methodologies, along with another probability puzzle.

My interview journey for the MTS role at DE Shaw began in June-July 2024.

The initial phase was an Online Assessment consisting of two LeetCode medium questions. I don't recall the exact problems, but I managed to complete the first one and passed most test cases for the second.

A month later, I was called for a Screening Round. This round heavily emphasized writing clean and structured code. I was tasked with designing a data structure for browser history with functionalities like adding/removing links, searching by keywords (where each link could have many), printing links in insertion order, and handling duplicate links. For instance, '/google/search' would have 'google' and 'search' as keywords. I proposed using a doubly linked list for links and a hashmap for keywords, with the hashmap's values being a list of links. The interviewer asked me to implement this approach, even if it wasn't the most optimal. We also discussed several Java concepts like Runnable vs Thread, Stream API, Deadlock, Notify vs Wait, concurrency, and OOPS principles.

A week later, I proceeded to the In House Interviews.

Round 1 (1 hour) was an intense Java grilling session. Almost every concept was touched upon, from basic program execution to concurrency, JRE vs JVM, Singleton design pattern, the volatile keyword, method hiding vs method overriding, and ThreadPoolExecutor. This discussion took about 40 minutes. For the remaining 20 minutes, I was given a coding question: Kth Smallest Number in Multiplication Table. I suggested all three common approaches: sorting, using a priority queue, and binary search.

Round 2 (1 hour) was a mix of resume-based questions and design problems. We discussed the Singleton Design Pattern again. I was then asked to design a Flight Booking System, with a particular focus on finding multiple-stop flight schedules. Other design questions included designing an LRU Cache and designing Java annotations.

After two weeks, HR scheduled a third Technical Round, but it was unfortunately rescheduled at the last moment. I still haven't heard back from HR regarding its rescheduling.

My interview journey for the SDE1 role at DE Shaw began with a recruiter contact via email, followed by a Hackerrank test. The test comprised 8 MCQs covering CS fundamentals, OS, DBMS, and CN, along with 8 aptitude questions focusing on probability and P&C. There were also 3 coding problems, which I felt were LeetCode medium difficulty, each with a strict time constraint. I was only able to get the first question's code fully working and partially coded the other two. I received a rejection email a few days later, but the recruiter contacted me again, stating they liked my resume and shortlisted me for a different team, which restarted the process.

My interviews commenced on a Sunday morning.

Round 1 - Interview

Round 2 - Analytics/Prob Stat Interview

Round 3 - DSA Interview

Round 4

I never anticipated making it to the final round at DE Shaw. The rejection was momentarily disappointing, but the confidence and knowledge I gained through the preparation process were immense. Most interviewers were complimentary, affirming I was on the right track, even if they did consume my entire Sunday. I strongly feel that if companies are hesitant about non-CS backgrounds, they shouldn't extend interview invitations in the first place.

I recently interviewed for a SDE 1 lateral hire position at DE Shaw, participating in a code pair round. To my surprise, there were no DSA questions. The interview primarily focused on Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) and Database Management Systems (DBMS).

For OOP, I was asked questions related to abstract classes, inheritance, virtual methods, and the final keyword. The interviewer also provided a small class diagram and asked several questions based on it.

The DBMS part covered joins and indexing in databases. Following these conceptual questions, I was given a schema for restaurant, area, delivery_agent, and customer tables and was asked to write queries for two specific scenarios:

1. Youngest customer who lives in the most densely populated area of Mumbai.
2. Average rating of all the delivery agents who deliver to India Gate area of New Delhi.

I was also instructed to add any additional information or tables if required to solve these questions. This round was a good mix of theoretical knowledge and practical application in database querying.

I recently had an interview at De Shaw for an entry-level Software Developer role. The interview process focused heavily on problem-solving skills, and I was presented with two distinct coding challenges. While I felt I understood the first problem and could approach it, the second question proved to be quite complex, and I unfortunately could not come up with a full solution during the allotted time.