eBay || SWE3 Interview Experience || Bangalore
SWE IIIeBay | CodeSignal | OA | Industry Coding Assessment
eBay | SSE | In-person Interview | In-progress
SDE IIEbay Senior Software Engineer Interview Experience
Senior Software EngineereBay - T24 - Interview Experience
T241 more experiences below
Summary
I successfully interviewed for a Software Engineer III position at eBay in Bangalore, which involved four technical rounds and one director round, ultimately resulting in an offer.
Full Experience
My interview process at eBay for the SWE III role in Bangalore comprised five distinct rounds: four technical assessments and one director-level discussion. The coding challenges were conducted on the CodeSignal platform.
The first technical round began with a deep dive into my past projects. I was asked to draw system architecture diagrams and elaborate on the design decisions I made. This discussion was followed by a coding question: 3-Sum.
The second technical round was a pure problem-solving session. I was given two coding questions, and as I finished early, an additional question was presented.
For the third technical round, the focus shifted to system design. I was tasked with implementing a TinyURL system. This round included several follow-up questions, covering my choice of Base64 encoding, various corner cases, scalability considerations, and potential future improvements for the system.
The fourth technical round involved a project-focused discussion, alongside behavioral questions such as 'why I’m leaving my current company'. This round also included a coding question: N-Queens.
My final assessment was the fifth round with a Director. This was a conversational and interest-based discussion. The interviewer had a strong passion for OS, so many questions were centered around operating system concepts. We also discussed why Data Structures and Algorithms is my favorite subject, along with a few situational and behavioral questions.
I'm thrilled to share that by God’s grace, I was selected!
Interview Questions (3)
Design a system that generates a short URL from a given long URL and converts a short URL back to the original long URL. Considerations included uniqueness, collision handling, scalability, and potential optimizations. I also had to explain my choice of Base64 encoding for generating short codes, discuss various corner cases, and suggest future improvements for the system.
The N-Queens puzzle is the problem of placing N non-attacking queens on an N×N chessboard. Given an integer n, return all distinct solutions to the N-Queens puzzle. Each solution contains a distinct board configuration of the N-Queens' placement, where 'Q' and '.' both indicate a queen and an empty space respectively.
Summary
I recently completed an Online Assessment for eBay on CodeSignal, which involved implementing a complete banking system across several levels.
Full Experience
Hi Fam, I recently appeared for the eBay Industry Coding Assessment (OA) on CodeSignal. This assessment was quite different from the general coding assessments which usually have four random Data Structures questions. In this ICA, I was given a project codebase and my task was to implement several interfaces, classes, and methods to pass the test cases for each level of a banking system.
Interview Questions (4)
Implement the core functionalities of a banking system including account creation, deposits, and transfers.boolean createAccount(String accountId, int timestamp) - Create new accountsOptional<Integer> deposit(String accountId, int timestamp, int amount) - Deposit money into accountsOptional<Integer> transfer(String fromId, String toId, int timestamp, int amount) - Transfer money between accounts
Implement a function to retrieve the top N accounts based on their outgoing transactions.List<String> topSpenders(int timestamp, int n) - Returns top N accounts based on outgoing transactions, sorted by amount (descending) and then by account ID (ascending)
Implement functionalities for scheduling payments, checking their status, and processing them with cashback.void schedulePayment(String accountId, String targetAccId, int timestamp, int amount, double cashbackPercentage) - Schedule payments with cashbackString getPaymentStatus(String accountId, int timestamp, String paymentId) - Check if payment is scheduled, processed, or failedvoid processScheduledPayments(int currentTimestamp) - Execute scheduled payments and apply cashback
Implement a function to merge two existing accounts, combining their balances and updating all associated transaction histories.void mergeAccounts(String accountId1, String accountId2) - Merge two accounts, combining balances and updating all transaction histories
Summary
I interviewed for a Senior Staff Engineer role at eBay, which involved a mix of system design discussions covering current architecture and scalability, along with a coding challenge to find prime numbers up to N. The process is ongoing, with further rounds planned online.
Full Experience
I'm currently a Senior Staff Engineer at Walmart with 6 years of experience. I applied for an SSE role at eBay through Workday. The exact level wasn't clear initially but would be determined by my performance. My in-person interview was scheduled for one day but extended due to the number of candidates. I was interviewing for the communications platform team, which appears to be a new initiative. My first round was with a Director of Engineering and, surprisingly, focused more on High-Level Design of my current team's architecture for 30 minutes, after a 10-minute intro. The remaining 15 minutes involved a coding question: 'Given a number n, print all the prime numbers leading up to n.' I presented both a naive O(n * sqrt(n)) approach and the Sieve of Eratosthenes, though I felt the latter wasn't fully understood. The second round, with an Engineering Manager, was abstract. We discussed how to productionize and scale a system, key metrics for API development and testing, and general questions about GenAI tools. The TA team informed me that due to time constraints, the remaining rounds would be conducted online, and I'll update this post once they're complete.
Interview Questions (5)
Given a number n, print all the prime numbers leading upto n.
Discussion on the process and considerations for taking a system into production.
Discussion on strategies and techniques for scaling a system.
What metrics should be looked for when building and testing an API?
Some general questions related to GenAI tools.
Summary
I interviewed for a Senior Software Engineer role at Ebay, which involved multiple technical and system design rounds. I was downleveled to a mid-level position and did not accept the offer due to salary expectations.
Full Experience
Screening Round
-
A simple weighted grouping question. Given groups corresponding to each weight: For eg: 100-200 -> Light weight 200 - 300 -> mid weight 400 - 500 -> heavy weight tell the frequency in each group and return min and max. Key here was, do it as system design, make all classes etc.
-
Buy and Sell stock unlimited number of times
On-site one
- Top k frequent elements
- Sudoku Solver
- Merge Intervals You are expected to do only 2..I did 3 because I was quick to solve the first two
On-site two
- Standard behavioural questions
On-site three
- Implement ls-r given directory structure as dictionary, return all files within one directory and subdirectories. You can do a simple sort and binary search but I made the mistake of doing it with tries. They are more interested in overall development and want unit tests etc also, not just the best most optimised algo, although I would argue in this case, trie is no entirely better than binary search
On-site four
System design round, was asked to implement an online flash sale It got really deep, where I was expected to write even deep level api calls, handle mutex, optimisitic locking, pessimistic locking etc
Verdict: Downlevelled from senior to mid, did not meet salary expectations so did not take the offer.
Interview Questions (7)
Given items that fall into predefined weight ranges (e.g., 100-200 for Light weight, 200-300 for mid weight, 400-500 for heavy weight), determine the frequency of items in each group and return the minimum and maximum values within each group. The interviewer emphasized a system design approach, suggesting the implementation of classes.
You are given an array prices where prices[i] is the price of a given stock on the ith day. Design an algorithm to find the maximum profit. You may complete as many transactions as you like (i.e., buy one and sell one share of the stock multiple times). You may not simultaneously buy multiple shares of stock (i.e., you must sell the stock before you buy again).
Given an integer array nums and an integer k, return the k most frequent elements. You may return the answer in any order.
Write a program to solve a Sudoku puzzle by filling the empty cells. A sudoku solution must satisfy all of the following rules: 1. Each of the digits 1-9 must appear exactly once in each row. 2. Each of the digits 1-9 must appear exactly once in each column. 3. Each of the digits 1-9 must appear exactly once in each of the 9 3x3 sub-boxes of the grid. The '.' character indicates empty cells.
Given an array of intervals where intervals[i] = [start_i, end_i], merge all overlapping intervals, and return an array of the non-overlapping intervals that cover all the intervals in the input.
Implement the functionality of ls -r. Given a directory structure represented as a dictionary (or similar data structure), return all files within the specified directory and its subdirectories recursively.
Design an online flash sale system. The design should cover deep-level API calls, and incorporate mechanisms for handling concurrency, such as mutexes, optimistic locking, and pessimistic locking.
Summary
I interviewed for a T24 role at eBay, which included an Online Assessment and three face-to-face rounds focusing on Data Structures & Algorithms, project discussions, and scenario-based questions. I successfully cleared the interview and received an offer.
Full Experience
YOE: 3 years, Currently working at a PBC
Recruiter reached out to me based on my profile
Round 1 : OA (90 min)
This was conducted on CodeSignal and involved developing a banking application with four progressive levels. Each level required passing a set of test cases to advance to the next. The first level focused on implementing account creation, deposit, and credit functionalities. The second level involved handling transactions between accounts. The third level required managing transaction failures and implementing rollbacks. I was able to complete up to the third level.
Rounds 2, 3, and 4 were conducted face-to-face, all on the same day. Each round was an elimination round.
Round 2 :
https://leetcode.com/problems/all-nodes-distance-k-in-binary-tree/description/
And follow ups for this
Round 3 :
I was asked about the projects I’ve worked on at my current company. Based on that, he gave me a few scenario-based questions and asked how I would approach or implement them. Toward the end, I was given a DSA question that I was only able to solve partially. I found it to be quite hard one. Couldn’t find a similar one on LeetCode.
Round 4 :
Again discussed about my projects and resume, followed by 2 DSA questions
https://leetcode.com/problems/move-zeroes/description/
https://leetcode.com/problems/3sum/description/
Four days later, the HR informed me that they had decided to move forward with me.
Interview Questions (5)
Develop a banking application on CodeSignal with four progressive levels. Level 1: implement account creation, deposit, and credit functionalities. Level 2: handle transactions between accounts. Level 3: manage transaction failures and implement rollbacks. I completed up to the third level.
I was asked about the projects I’ve worked on at my current company. Based on that, the interviewer gave me a few scenario-based questions and asked how I would approach or implement them.
Summary
I had a virtual first-round interview with eBay for a Software Engineer, MTS 1 role, which included a coding question on LeetCode 581.
Full Experience
Started the interview with basic questions regarding the projects on resume. And one coding round - 581. Shortest Unsorted Continuous Subarray
Interview Questions (1)
The coding round involved solving LeetCode problem 581: Shortest Unsorted Continuous Subarray.