Oracle Interviews

I applied for a Senior AI engineer role at Oracle's OAL team through Naukri. The OA included topics like Machine Learning, LLM, Prompt Engineering, Aptitude, and Problem Solving. There were 10 MCQs and one coding question where I had to find the index to remove from an array so that the sum of even and odd positions equals. I initially used a brute force approach but then optimized it to pass all test cases.

In the first interview round, there were two interviewers, one being the Hiring Manager. The HM asked a backtracking coding question about generating number strings where the sum of digits equals a lucky number K. I struggled with this and bombed it. The other interviewer asked questions about my resume and then moved on to two coding problems: LRU cache using a doubly linked list and Top Kth Element using a min heap. I answered these well. The HM also asked a puzzle about measuring 9 minutes with 7 and 4-minute hourglasses, which I solved in 5 minutes. However, the HR informed me I didn't get positive feedback and was rejected, likely due to the initial challenges.

I had recently interviewed with Oracle for the position of IC4 at Oracle Health. The process started with a screening round on October 30th, where I was asked basic OOPs concepts, string immutability, serialization, synchronization, and some data structure questions. I also had to implement reverse a string using recursion and discuss linked list operations.

The next round on November 10th was a DSA round with two LeetCode problems: maximum product of three numbers and search in rotated sorted array. I had to solve these on paper, which was a bit challenging.

The third round on November 12th was a HLD round, where I discussed technologies used, Java versions, AWS, and a parking lot HLD. The fourth round was a hiring manager round focusing on project discussions and behavioral questions. The final round was a bartender round, where I discussed projects and a hospital management HLD.

Despite the interviews being average to good, I was surprised to be asked for the HLD of a parking lot. After the interviews, I was ghosted by HR and didn't receive any feedback.

I recently experienced a technical screen at Oracle for an IC4 position, and unfortunately, it didn't go as planned, leading to me bombing it. This interview notably leaned more towards system design and behavioral aspects than the typical LeetCode-style DSA problems I might have expected.

The session kicked off with a series of STAR method behavioral questions. I was asked to describe a time when I made a significant mistake and how I went about fixing it. We also discussed the technologies and frameworks I typically use, with an emphasis on highlighting specific frameworks. Another behavioral question prompted me to recall a situation where I was working on something I initially didn't understand at all, and how I managed to overcome that challenge to complete the task.

The technical portion, administered via HackerRank, consisted of two main problems. The first task was to design a server scheduler. I was given a server and an end time for a task, and my implementation needed to return a signal indicating whether the job could or could not be run. The second question built directly on the first, extending the scenario to include multiple servers with dependencies. This problem was explicitly described as similar to the 'Course Scheduler' problem found on LeetCode, strongly suggesting a solution involving a directed graph and Depth-First Search (DFS).

My screening round for the PMTS role at Oracle was a truly poor experience. The interview began with two behavioral questions. Following this, I was given a coding challenge: Kth Largest element in BST. I was able to complete the code along with the necessary boilerplate, but I encountered a significant issue with HackerRank's compiler. This technical glitch wasted at least 7-8 minutes, during which the interviewer remained completely unhelpful, simply watching me struggle. Frustrated, I eventually had to ask him to compile the code on his own system to verify it.

Next, I was asked to perform a complete Low-Level Design (LLD) of a multilevel parking system. At this point, only 20 minutes were left for this entire section. I clarified with the recruiter what was expected given the severe time constraint, and he mentioned that a complete design with code was required. With such limited time, I could only define the Functional Requirements (FR) and Non-Functional Requirements (NFR), sketch out a class diagram, and briefly explain my approach for reserving and freeing parking slots, along with a high-level discussion of the API design. The expectation of a complete design and code in such a short period was extremely infuriating.

I tried to reach out to the recruiter multiple times regarding the issues I faced during the interview, but he informed me that he could not provide any assistance. My overall impression of Oracle's interview process, particularly their time management and the conduct of their interviewers, was very negative. If they intend to ask LLD questions in a screening round, they should allocate sufficient time or stick exclusively to LeetCode-style problems. Their attempt to emulate Amazon's approach of including behavioral questions in all rounds, but with such poor execution, truly sucks.

Thumbs down to their pathetic code of conduct.

My Oracle On-Campus Interview Experience

I recently participated in Oracle's on-campus placement drive, aiming for an Intern + FTE role. The selection process was comprehensive, starting with an Online Assessment, followed by four distinct interview rounds: two technical, one managerial, and a final HR round.

Round 1: Technical Round (45 mins)

This round was quite intense, focusing heavily on core Computer Science concepts, theoretical knowledge, and basic coding skills. We delved into various topics to assess my foundational understanding.

Round 2: Technical Round (45 mins)

The second technical round was a blend of Data Structures and Algorithms (DSA) and further CS fundamentals. This round involved solving specific coding problems and discussing more complex concepts.

Round 3: Managerial Round (30 mins)

This round was designed to test my problem-solving abilities beyond just technical skills, evaluating my behavioral aspects and how I handle pressure in challenging situations. It was more about my approach and thought process.

Round 4: HR Round (5 mins)

The final HR round was brief and focused on standard questions to assess cultural fit and logistical preferences, confirming my alignment with the company's expectations.

Ultimately, I received an offer for the Intern + FTE role, which I was very excited about!

Oracle visited our campus in September 2024, recruiting for Full-Time Software Developer roles across different teams. I went through their interview process which included an online assessment, two technical interviews, and a final HR/managerial round.

Round 1: HackerRank Online Assessment

This round comprised one coding question based on simple math/triangles and multiple-choice questions covering Aptitude, OS, CN, OOPs, and DBMS. I attempted all questions and felt confident about my performance, believing I scored around 80%.

Round 2: Technical Interview 1 (In-person)

This interview focused on Data Structures & Algorithms, my resume, and frontend concepts. I was asked to implement Merge Sort and traverse a linked list, demonstrating both brute-force and optimized approaches. We also discussed my project and tech stack from my resume, along with the detailed steps involved when entering a web page URL. Frontend questions touched upon HTML tags, React DOM, unit testing, semantic elements, and CSS basics. I felt very confident about this round and successfully cleared it.

Round 3: Technical Interview 2 (In-person)

The second technical interview delved deeper into DSA, Java, and OOPs. I implemented a solution to remove duplicates from a linked list, presenting both a brute-force and an optimized method. Java discussions included a simple multithreading implementation and some high-level concepts. For OOPs, I was asked about inheritance implementation and some tricky theoretical questions. This round also felt positive, and I moved to the final stage.

Round 4: HR + Managerial

This final round covered cultural fit questions, further discussion of my resume, and an explanation of the client-server flow and its steps. Honestly, I couldn’t quite gauge the interviewers' mood during this session.

Despite clearing all the technical rounds, I received a rejection. I had been hopeful, especially after feeling good about the HR round. It was my first in-person interview, and I genuinely felt I performed strongly on the technical aspects. While the rejection was disheartening, I knew I had given my best. I suspect less preparation for the managerial/behavioral questions and more spontaneous answers might have contributed to the outcome. I hope sharing my experience can be helpful for others preparing for interviews.

I interviewed for the Principal MTS (PMTS) level at Oracle USA. The process involved a phone screen followed by a comprehensive onsite loop.

Phone Screen (60 mins)

• I faced 2 behavioral questions.
• There was 1 standard coding question on binary trees, which I completed quickly in about 5 minutes.
• The main focus was a system design problem centered on a metrics and logging system. This round lasted almost 35 minutes and involved extensive discussions on Kafka, Elastic Search DB, various design choices, and tradeoffs.

Onsite Interview Rounds

My onsite interviews included:

• System Design: This round began with 2 behavioral questions. The core technical part was to design a job scheduler system. Having studied this topic previously, the conversation flowed smoothly. The interviewer delved deep into indexes, specifically primary and sort keys of DynamoDB, Global Secondary Indexes (GSI), and the rationale behind using NoSQL for such a system.
• Hiring Manager: This 60-minute session was split into 30 minutes of behavioral questions and 30 minutes dedicated to system design. The design question was closely related to the hiring manager's team's work. They probed extensively into all my design choices, requiring me to propose alternatives and compare tradeoffs, and also discuss the design's flexibility in adapting to future requirement changes.
• Coding Round 1: After 2 behavioral questions, I received a big question prompt on Hackerrank. It involved flights data with dependencies (e.g., flight1 → flight2). The task was to return a sorted list of all delayed flight IDs, given an initial list of delayed flights. I recognized it as a simple DFS application, though I initially considered topological sort.
• Bar Raiser (Bar Tender): This 60-minute session was an in-depth conversation covering my background, most challenging project, design choices, my role and impact, collaboration with other teams, conflict resolution, situations where things went south, and how I mentored junior/mid-senior engineers. It was a lot of talking.
• Coding Round 2: Similar to the first coding round, this also started with 2 behavioral questions. The problem statement was explained verbally, without a prompt on Hackerrank, so I took notes. The question boiled down to finding the maximum length of a subarray with all unique IDs in a given list. A follow-up asked what if the subarray could contain at most 'k' distinct unique IDs. I knew these types of problems are common on LeetCode.

The recruiter contacted me within two days with positive feedback and an offer. However, I ultimately decided to pass on the offer as I had competing staff-level offers from other companies.

Overall, I found the conversations pleasant and the interviewers to be good.

I recently had the opportunity to interview with Oracle for an SDE 2 position and was delighted to receive an offer. My interview journey spanned several rounds, each designed to evaluate different aspects of my technical prowess and behavioral aptitude.

Screening Round:

The initial screening round presented me with a LeetCode medium-level problem that required the use of a priority queue. This was followed by questions specifically targeting Java and Spring Boot frameworks.

Loop Interviews:

Round 1: Technical Round (1 hour)

This round was heavily focused on Data Structures and Algorithms. I encountered two DSA problems: one involved a hashmap, which was relatively easy, and another tree-based problem that bore a strong resemblance to LeetCode's "Binary Tree Maximum Path Sum". Additionally, the interviewer delved into JavaScript topics, specifically questioning my understanding of page rendering/loading optimizations and the event loop.

Round 2: Technical Round (~1 hour)

The second technical round featured a LeetCode medium-level graph problem. Further discussions ensued around Java/Spring Boot, and I was also asked to write SQL queries for two distinct problems.

Round 3: Behavioral Round (45 minutes)

This round was dedicated to assessing my behavioral skills. I was presented with various situation-based questions designed to understand my approach to teamwork, problem-solving, and conflict resolution.

Round 4: System Design Round (~1.5 hours)

The system design challenge was to "Design BookMyShow". The interviewer's primary interest was in my approach to handling concurrency. I was explicitly asked to focus on the concurrency aspects and to bypass the detailed design of services or APIs. We also discussed multithreading in depth, and there were questions related to the projects I had mentioned in my resume.

Ultimately, I was selected, and I'm very pleased with the outcome.

Round-1

My first round consisted of various technical questions. I was asked two puzzles:

1. A classic puzzle about splitting 10 coins (some heads, some tails) into two groups while blindfolded such that both groups have an equal number of heads.
2. Another puzzle asked for the number of equilateral triangles that can be formed using 6 matchsticks.

Following the puzzles, there were two SQL questions:

1. One involved joining tables and finding the Nth highest salary, with a follow-up to discuss different ways to achieve this.
2. The second SQL question required converting percentages into grades from a table. I initially suggested using a CASE statement, but a follow-up asked for an alternative approach without CASE, which I proposed could be done by creating a lookup table for percentage ranges and grades, then joining.

I also had a coding question:

1. Write code to validate if a date given in "DDMMYYYY" format is correct.

DBMS questions were next:

1. I was asked to explain ACID properties with examples.
2. Normalization and its use cases were also discussed.

The round concluded with questions about my internship experience, project, and the four pillars of OOPs concepts and their use cases in my project.

Round-2

The second round was focused on Data Structures and Algorithms, with four questions asked:

1. I was given an array and needed to find a subarray such that its minimum size is 'm' and the sum of its elements is 'k'. A follow-up question delved into using Dynamic Programming for this.
2. A word problem was presented that clearly indicated the use of Dijkstra's algorithm, followed by Bellman-Ford (with a reminder to consider constraints).
3. The final DSA question involved a binary tree with a mirror placed at the bottom. I needed to return all leaf nodes that "lead to the root," essentially requiring me to treat the tree as a graph problem.

Round-3

The final round was an HR discussion:

1. I was asked about my academic branch and my motivation to switch into the IT industry.
2. My minor degree was also a topic of discussion.
3. We had an in-depth conversation about my internship experience at LinkedIn and my project. The interviewer probed into alternative approaches for specific problems within my project, questioning why certain ideas might not work and testing my confidence in having explored various solutions.
4. I was asked to explain the SOLID principles of OOPs.
5. They inquired about my understanding of Oracle's operations and why I believed I would be a good fit for the Application Developer role.
6. Another question was about how I managed to balance core academics, learn technical skills, and maintain a good CGPA simultaneously.
7. Finally, I was given the opportunity to ask questions.

My interview journey at Oracle consisted of five distinct rounds.

The first round was a DSA Online/Technical Coding Round on HackerRank/CodePair. I was given two medium-level problems, which involved concepts like arrays, hashmaps, and sliding window. The emphasis was on writing clean, optimized code and clearly articulating my approach.

Following that, I had a second DSA Technical Coding Round. The questions in this round were slightly more challenging, focusing on binary search, heaps, and dynamic programming. There were also follow-up questions centered on optimizing for both time and space complexity.

The third round was another DSA Technical Coding Round, which delved into problem-solving combined with data structure design. For instance, I was asked questions related to designing systems like an LRU Cache or a custom stack. This round also involved handling edge cases and performing dry runs with test cases.

Next up was the System Design Round. As this was for an experienced role, the discussion was more focused on low-level design. We talked about designing scalable systems, such as a URL shortener, a notification service, or a booking system. Key areas of discussion included choosing appropriate databases, designing APIs, managing concurrency, and understanding various trade-offs.

Finally, the fifth round was a Managerial + HR Round. This round primarily involved discussions about my previous projects, the challenges I've encountered, and my experiences working in team scenarios. I also faced a few behavioral questions, such as 'Tell me about a time you disagreed with your manager?' and 'How do you handle deadlines and pressure?'. There were also some light technical questions to gauge my overall understanding.

I recently interviewed for the SMTS (Senior Member of Technical Staff) position at Oracle OCI. My current experience stands at 4.2 years at Informatica, a product-based company, with a compensation of around 32-34LPA CTC.

Interview Process

Screening Round

This round involved a coding question similar to 'Merge K sorted lists'. I was expected to provide a dry run and working code. We also discussed my projects, Apache Spark vs. Flink, and the concept of statelessness in REST APIs. I successfully cleared this round.

Loop Round 1 (Taken by SMTS)

In this coding round, I was asked to convert a prefix expression to a postfix expression (e.g., +ab to ab+). The second coding question was about designing an LRU Cache, including discussions on data structure choices, achieving constant-time operations, and making it thread-safe. I performed well and received a 'Strong Hire' rating.

Loop Round 2 (Bartender Round - Taken by PMTS)

This round focused heavily on my projects, with an in-depth discussion about the choices I made during development. I also faced questions about managing difficult stakeholders and several other behavioral scenarios. I received a 'Strong Hire' rating for this round as well.

Loop Round 3 (Taken by Hiring Manager)

This round was centered on High-Level Design (HLD). The problem involved designing a Concurrent Job Orchestrator that supports highly concurrent job executions, priority, license handling, and autoscalability. There were also some tricky behavioral questions. I was rated 'Hire/Strong Hire'.

Loop Round 4 (Taken by PMTS)

The final loop round began with an in-depth discussion about my projects, focusing specifically on the design decisions and reasoning behind using Apache Spark. The remaining 30 minutes were dedicated to a system design question:

Content Management System: A large multinational food company wanted a system to display in-store menu items for each of their locations. The system needed central management, the ability to show scheduled promotions, allow different prices per menu item at each location, and support breakfast, lunch, and dinner options.

I got really nervous during this design question and struggled to complete a comprehensive design within the 20-minute timeframe. This round did not go well, and I received a 'No Hire' rating.

Outcome

The recruiter eventually reached out. Due to my performance in the last round, the team could not offer me the SMTS position. Instead, they offered an MTS role, which I ultimately rejected.

In mid-September, I participated in a pre-screening round for an IC3 position at Oracle OCI. The interview primarily revolved around a single, complex data structures and algorithms problem. I am currently awaiting further communication regarding my application, and the status on the recruitment portal remains 'Interview and Selection'.

My interview journey with Oracle Health commenced with a screening round focused on Data Structures and Algorithms. I was given two DSA problems, one of which was the classic Coin Change problem, and the other was related to counting sort. After successfully clearing the screening, I moved on to Round 1.

Round 1 was a mixed bag, testing both my Java knowledge and problem-solving skills. We discussed the differences between Java's abstract classes and interfaces, a fundamental concept. Following that, I tackled the LeetCode Median of Two Sorted Arrays problem. The interviewer also delved into my understanding of microservices, their advantages, REST APIs, and specific CRUD operations using an employee records example. We touched upon various types of pagination and the distinction between forbidden and unauthorized status codes. Finally, I was asked about the Java Stream API and how to extract the first 3 minimum and 3 maximum elements using it.

Round 2 was dedicated to High-Level Design (HLD). My task was to design a Metric and Logging Platform, which involved outlining the architecture and key components.

The third round was a "Bartender" round, which was essentially a behavioral interview. I was asked to share experiences about my most challenging project, a time when I took a risk and failed, how I handled negative feedback from a manager, an instance where I went beyond my role definition for a customer, and a situation where I set a personal goal and achieved it.

Finally, Round 4 was with the Hiring Manager, primarily focusing on a detailed discussion about my previous projects and a high-level system design question related to a Hospital Management System.

My screening round for an IC3 role at Oracle began with a thirty-minute discussion about my professional profile. Following that, I was presented with two Data Structures and Algorithms problems. The first question was about merging overlapping intervals, and the second involved finding the longest non-repeating substring within a given string.

Hi Fam, I'm currently an SSE at Walmart with 6.3 years of experience. I recently appeared for a screening round for the SMTS (IC3) role on the Workflow Team at Oracle OCI. This round was taken by a fellow SMTS. The first 20 minutes were dedicated to an introduction and a discussion where I described the most challenging project I've worked on. Following that, I had a 40-minute coding session where I was given a problem to design a video buffer data structure. I'm currently waiting for further loop rounds to be scheduled.

I recently went through a screening round for an SMTS role (IC3) on the KMS team, which is part of the Security Products Group at Oracle OCI. The KMS team is identified as a Tier-0 Service. The interview was conducted by a fellow SMTS. The round focused on two coding problems followed by theoretical discussions for the remaining 15 minutes.

I attended the Oracle Blitz Hiring event. The first part was a coding round where I was presented with a challenging problem. This coding challenge focused on creating word squares from a given set of four-letter words. Following the coding assessment, I proceeded to three additional interview rounds. These subsequent interviews primarily delved into my resume, system design capabilities, and questions related to Oracle's Leadership Principles (OHAI LP).

My Oracle screening round for the SSE role consisted of three distinct parts. The first part involved an easy-medium coding question centered around a Priority Queue. The second part was a System Design challenge to generate Unique IDs. Finally, the third part focused on the Low-Level Design (LLD) of a Singleton class.

I must admit, I felt quite jittery before and during the interview, likely due to insufficient sleep the night prior. This impacted my performance, particularly in Part 1 where I took too long to solve the problem. Additionally, I believe I overlooked a crucial detail in the LLD of the Singleton class, which may have led to my potential rejection or ghosting.

Pre-screening Round

My interview journey with Oracle Health began in August 2025. After a recruiter reached out via email, we had a video conference where she detailed the Senior Software Developer profile, emphasizing it would be primarily backend work with some frontend.

This round covered various technical topics:

• Differences between exceptions and errors in Java.
• How to create an immutable class.
• Concepts related to deadlock.
• All SOLID principles with illustrative examples.
• Factory and Abstract Factory design patterns.
• Encapsulation versus Abstraction.
• Questions on Actuator and Dispatcher Servlet, which I admittedly didn't know.
• Discussion about my projects. I clarified that my professional experience was mainly in C++ but that I used Java extensively for DSA.

I left this round not expecting to proceed further, mainly due to my C++ background and my inability to answer the Spring Boot questions.

Loop Round 1 - Hiring Manager Round

This round started with introductions and a discussion about my current role. Surprisingly, the hiring manager mentioned they were looking for a frontend developer, which directly contradicted the recruiter's information about a backend-focused role. Despite this, the interview continued.

We discussed API query parameters, path variables, and request bodies. The main focus was a system design question for a BookMyShow-like service. The interviewer was primarily interested in requirements and API design, specifically asking for API request types, request bodies, and response bodies. We skipped database schema and estimations due to time constraints, and I concluded by creating an HLD diagram. The interviewer was friendly throughout.

Loop Round 2 - DSA

After a brief project discussion, I was asked to convert a number to a Roman numeral. My initial solution used a direct mapping for all combinations (e.g., 1000, 900, 500, 400). The interviewer then challenged me to use only base mappings (1000, 500, etc.) and make the solution "extensible." I provided a hardcoded solution for this, which wasn't satisfactory. He then hinted at a pattern where for 'even' values (like 1000), the next subtraction rule might be at index +2, and for 'odd' values (like 500), at index +1. I coded this, but I argued that this pattern itself wasn't truly "extensible" for Roman numerals, as they are fixed, and this arbitrary pattern wasn't a universal rule. I felt I had provided a correct solution, even if not meeting his specific "extensible" criteria for an inherently non-extensible system.

Loop Round 3 - Bartender Round

This round began with the interviewer introducing himself, followed by questions about my current work and projects, focusing on a specific feature I implemented. He tried to delve quite deeply into the feature, which I felt was beyond the scope of this round, especially since my C++ protocol development work was hard for him to grasp. Despite my use of analogies, I doubt he fully understood. We also discussed disagreements with seniors. The interviewer was neutral, neither friendly nor rude.

Loop Round 4 - DSA

This round involved a mix of DSA and core Java concepts:

• I had to implement a producer-consumer problem using two threads to count and print odd and even numbers alternately, using wait/notify.
• Questions on Cloneable, Serializable, and the transient keyword.
• Implementing an immutable class and the use of the final keyword.
• Creating a thread-safe singleton class.
• A DSA question to find a cycle in a linked list. I offered both the slow/fast pointer and HashSet approaches. He requested another approach, but I couldn't recall one.
• Another DSA question was about the sum of values of all leaf nodes in a binary tree. I provided a recursive solution, and when he clarified he wanted only the sum of leaf nodes at the deepest level, I quickly adapted my code. I performed dry runs for both DSA problems.

This interview went very well, and I felt I answered about 90% of the questions correctly. I couldn't answer some specific questions like the drawbacks of Cloning or the multiton pattern.

Verdict: Not Selected

The recruiter later provided feedback, which was quite conflicting:

1. The hiring manager claimed I failed to implement the DB schema in the system design round, which was baffling because she explicitly told me to skip it and focus on API design.
2. She also stated I couldn't make the system design, which I strongly disagree with. I provided a design, asked clarifying questions, and offered options when she gave no input, always confirming my choices.
3. Another piece of feedback claimed I couldn't come up with a solution for one of the DSA rounds. This is also untrue; I provided correct solutions, even if one wasn't "extensible" in the way the interviewer preferred for an inappropriate problem context.

In conclusion, I'd advise caution with overly "friendly" interviewers. I suspect my rejection was more likely due to my C++ background or the initial confusion about the role's frontend/backend requirements, leading the hiring manager to fabricate feedback. This kind of experience can be quite disheartening for job seekers.

I am currently working in a top fintech company as a SDE-2. I had previously worked in one of Oracle's subsidiaries. I got the call from a recruiter one day. She scheduled the first eliminator round. I was asked a medium-level DSA problem and a lot of questions on my resume. I cleared the first eliminator round.

The recruiter then scheduled all my loop interviews on a day. Each round lasted one hour.

Loop Interview 1:
1. Write the python function which will be used to run a shell command in parallel on thousands of nodes. We need to optimize the code so that it does not overwhelm the machine where we run this code.
2. Design a volume as a service with inputs: size of volume, IOPS, mount path. Should adhere to general cloud service agreements like high availability.
The interviewer was very friendly. He said 'we' will solve this design problem. Gave a lot of hints. He also said you can browse the net if you are not sure of the syntax.

Loop Interview 2:
1. Find the longest palindromic substring in a string.
2. Follow up: If you can add a character to the substring at any place. What would be the longest palindromic substring?
I was able to code the brute force approach. Got stuck in the follow up question tho. Messed it up !!

Loop Interview 3:
1. Why you want to switch?
2. Current Compensation Details?
3. Can you work from office 5 days?
4. Write Merge Sort
I was turned off when he said the WFO policy and started asking current compensation. Also interviewer seemed really strict.

Hi Fam, I'm currently an SSE at Walmart with 6 years of experience. I recently appeared for a screening round for the OpenSearch Team at Oracle OCI for an SMTS (IC3) role.

The screening round was taken by the Hiring Manager. It consisted of three main parts:

1. Design Whiteboard (25 min)

The MVP requirement was to allow multiple users to edit texts concurrently. The design also needed to be flexible enough to include shapes in future phases.

2. Technical Questions

I was asked several technical questions covering various concepts:

• What is Stateful and Stateless APIs?
• What is reflection?
• I was quizzed around different HTTP error codes: 4xx, 5xx, 2xx.
• What is a multidimensional array? What are its real-life applications?
• What is a hashtable? How is it different from a HashMap? What are its real-life applications?
• What is a linked list? How is it different from an array? What are the real-life applications of a linked list? I also discussed time complexities for linked list traversal, etc.
• What is a circuit breaker? I had to explain its concept.
• How do you reverse a linked list?

3. Project-level discussion (15 min)

The discussion revolved around questions on Elasticsearch and streaming pipelines, based on my past projects.

Overall, it was a comprehensive screening round covering system design, core technical knowledge, and project-specific expertise.

I recently had an interview at Oracle for an SMTS IC3 position. The interview revolved around a single, specific algorithmic problem. The problem, titled 'Biological Hazards', challenged me to analyze interactions between bacteria samples arranged in a row. The core task was to identify contiguous intervals where all bacteria could coexist without any being poisonous to another within that segment.

I applied for the MTS 2 role at Oracle via their portal and received a callback after about 15-20 days, following numerous prior rejections. The recruiter explained the process, stating that the first round would be an eliminator, focusing on Data Structures and Algorithms, problem-solving, and a minor project discussion. I confirmed that Java or a similar language was acceptable.

My first round was with a principal engineer who had 11 years at Oracle. He immediately delved into a project discussion, grilling me intensely for 45 minutes on topics like Kubernetes, AWS, VPC, sidecar and init containers, microservices, connection protocols, and logging systems. He even challenged the architectural choices of my projects. In the remaining 10 minutes, he asked a simple DSA question: checking for anagrams, and insisted I use Java. Although I am familiar with Java, I hadn't practiced DSA extensively and struggled significantly. An unexpected electricity cut further compounded my panic, causing me to lose focus. After multiple trials and some assistance from hackerrank's autofill, I eventually completed the problem.

I was rejected straight off the bat!

Hi All,

I appeared for an interview at Oracle last week.

Experience: 5.5 years
Current Company: Service-based

Round 1: DSA + Technical Discussion (1.5 hrs)

- Problem-solving round involving the Longest Common Substring question
- Discussion on my project experience
- Concepts around memoization and lazy loading
- A few scenario-based questions
- Questions on design patterns
- React hooks fundamentals
- Core JavaScript topics were also covered

Round 2: Machine Coding + Deep Dive (1.5 hrs)
- Questions based on the technologies mentioned in my resume
- More discussion on design patterns
- Hands-on JavaScript coding (topics included higher-order functions, singleton pattern, closures)
- Questions related to the event loop
- Some output-based questions
- A few polyfill implementations

I haven't heard back after this round yet.

Note: A strong understanding of JavaScript fundamentals is also crucial for clearing these rounds.

Thank you!

I saw a post by recruiter on LinkedIn and contacted him via InMail. The recruiter contacted within few days asking basic details. Then radio silence for 3 weeks and then got a call from scheduling team for scheduling interviews

Screening Round Taken by a Principle MTS. I was asked 1 DSA question: Q: https://leetcode.com/problems/divide-two-integers/description/ Solved fully

Got a call from recruiter within 2 days for scheduling LOOP rounds:

Technical Round 1 (Taken by SMTS):

Round started with basic Java QUestions:

• Polymorphism in Java, how to acheive
• Composition & Association
• Aggregation
• Aggregation vs Composition

Then I was asked a DSA question:

• Longest Subarray with 0 Sum - question from GFG

Lastly, I was told to draw the HLD for an ECommerce website like Amazon. Expectations:

• Functional Requirements
• Non Functional Requirements
• DB Schema
• DB resilient design
• Services
• Diagram

Bartender Round:

Taken by someone from different team. I was asked multiple behavioural questions. The round went almost 45 mins

Tecnical Round 2 (Taken by Director of Engineering):

Few behavioural Questions.

2 coding questions:

• Given a String s, build all possible subsequences, sort them and return as a List
• Create a Thread safe data structure and write 2 producer and 1 consumer for it.

Tecnical Round 3 (Taken by a Principle MTS):

• Questions from Resume
• 1 DSA question: Q: Remove duplicate sequence from linked list. Ex: Input: 1->2->2->2->5->4->4, output: 1->5 Input: 1->1->2->2->2->5->4->4, output: 5

Hi Fam,

Appeared for screening round for SMTS position today at OCI (Security Products Group).

YOE: 6
Currently SSE@Walmart

1hr round, Platform: Hackerrank
1. 5 min intro.
2. 10 min project discussion and cross examination
3. DSA question: Divide 2 positive integers without using / operator.
Gave naive approach of repeated subtraction.
Probed on time complexity.
Asked me to come up with optimal solution. I couldn't.
This went for 20 min i think.
4. Asked me difference between HashMap and ConcurrentHashMap.
Explained him about the thread safety, segment locking, ConcurrentModificationException etc.
Interview ended 15 min early as he was done judging.

Overall, Interviewer didnt seem satisfied with my answers and I wouldn't be surprised if this turns into a no hire call.

I got this opportunity from Naukri. Recruiter mentioned it was a drive.

Round 1 - Basic Questions & DSA

Basic questions on java - difference between call by reference, call by value, oops concept , what is final, static keyword, all other basic questions which I don't remember.

1 DSA question - Minimum number of platforms.

Round 2 - HM

This was more around projects and I was given one DSA question which I was not able to solve this.

Verdict - Rejected

Phone Screening (VP Round)
Duration: ~15 minutes

The VP briefly reviewed my resume, focusing on my experience with notification services (a key requirement for the role).

Assessed my knowledge in relevant areas but did not dive deep.

Shortly after, I was scheduled for the technical rounds.

Technical Round 1 (DSA Focused)
Introduction: Brief discussion about my background.

Problem 1: https://leetcode.com/problems/merge-intervals/description/ (LeetCode)

Problem 2: Find the duplicate in an array of size n with elements in [0, n-1].

Expected solution: Efficient swapping approach (similar to https://leetcode.com/problems/find-the-duplicate-number/description/).

Technical Round 2 (Resume Deep Dive + DSA)
First 30 mins: In-depth discussion on my resume, covering:

• Redis Cache (eviction policies, clustering)
• Kafka (consumer groups, partitioning, offset management)
• REST API Security (OAuth 2.0, JWT, rate limiting)

High-level system design aspects of past projects.

DSA Problems:

Problem 1: Validate parentheses in a string (basic () case).

Follow-up: Extended to multiple types ((), [], {}).

Problem 2: Given an employee hierarchy (tree structure), find all reports under each manager.

Follow-up: Reverse lookup (find all managers for a given employee).

Technical Round 3 (Resume Grilling + Coding)
Resume Discussion: Focused on my experience with:

• Email Notification Service (SMTP, DLQ handling)
• Kafka (message retries, ordering guarantees)
• Blue-Green Deployment (strategies, advantages)

High availability, throughput, and latency optimizations.

Coding Problem: Multiply two very large integers represented as strings (e.g., "123456789" * "987654321").

Constraints: No use of BigInteger or language libraries—had to implement manual multiplication.

Final Discussion & Offer
After clearing all rounds, had a follow-up call with the VP within a day to discuss:

• Project alignment
• Salary expectations
• Background verification (BGV) process

Final Verdict: Hired!

Offer details: https://leetcode.com/discuss/post/6893969/oracle-pmts-bangalore-by-anonymous_user-j50z/

Hi Everyone,

I recently gave Phone Screening round for OCI.

In the invite, it was supposed to be a DSA round, but ended up with lot of topics.

Started with current Project discussion, architecture, role and responsibilities. Then some Cloud related questions eg: how load balancers work, caching, API gateways etc. Some Java/Spring boot related questions as well. But this time almost 25 mins already passed.

After that an intense discssion on a DSA problem.

Given a phone dictionary. Implement 3 operations

1. Add unique names to phone dictionary
2. Return all names from dictionary
3. Find all names starting b/w character range

For this problem i started with a simple HashMap to store unqiue names. And for finding names b/w range i proposed to use additional data-strucure to store character and name mapping(HashMap)

Later on improvement. I proposed a BST based solution. I was able to implement first 2 functionalities, for 3rd one i just gave the psuedo code.

May be I took a lot of time during the initial questions. That's why I got rejected/Ghosted.

Verdict - No response/Ghosted

Introduction

The interview began with a detailed walkthrough of my background, from my college days to my current role. The interviewer performed a deep dive into my resume, asking about every tool and technology I had mentioned. I also had to provide a high-level overview of my current project architecture and my specific responsibilities within it.

OOP & Design Principles

This section focused on core Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) and design principles. I was asked to explain each of the SOLID principles in depth. Following that, we discussed the differences between Abstract Classes and Interfaces, with a specific request to provide real-world, non-programming examples to illustrate my understanding.

REST API Concepts

The discussion moved to REST API concepts. I had to explain the differences between PUT, PATCH, and POST methods, including when and why each should be used. The interviewer then delved into the OPTIONS HTTP method, asking about its purpose and how it's used, particularly in scenarios like CORS preflight requests.

Low-Level Design & Patterns

I was challenged to design a system using Object-Oriented Design (OOD) principles and various design patterns. The expectation was to provide both code and a strong explanation, with a focus on clarity, modularity, and how the design mapped to real-world scenarios.

DSA Coding – Live Problem on HackerRank

This was the live coding section, where I had to solve a Data Structures & Algorithms (DSA) problem on HackerRank. The problem involved an array and 'k' operations, where in each operation, I could pick any number and divide it by 2. The goal was to perform up to 'k' operations to minimize the total array sum. I approached this using a max heap (priority queue) to continuously halve the largest number for 'k' times. I successfully implemented it and passed all test cases.

Database Design Discussion

We then discussed database design, specifically comparing SQL and NoSQL databases. I explained when to use each, their respective pros and cons, and touched upon the CAP theorem tradeoffs.

AI/ML Discussion

Briefly, I was asked if I had worked with AI/ML models or pipelines, and I shared any related experience I had.

Architecture Diagram

Finally, I was asked to verbally describe or sketch a high-level system architecture, with the focus on scalability, modularity, and deployment pipelines.

Final Thoughts

Overall, I felt I answered around 85–95% of the questions confidently. The interviewer was thorough, at times challenging even basic concepts deeply, but remained respectful throughout. Unfortunately, the recruiter never followed up after the round, despite my attempts to reach out.

Round 1 (In-person)

1. Given two arrays, sort without extra space
   A = [10, 2, 20, -1]
   B = [1, 5, 25]
   Output:
   A = [-1, 1, 2, 5]
   B = [10, 20, 25]
2. https://leetcode.com/problems/regular-expression-matching/description/
3. Implement Singleton class
   
   • Follow up: How do you prevent creating clones of the singleton class object?

Round 2 (In-person)

1. Given an array, reorder such that even numbers are pushed to the left side of the array and odd numbers to the right
2. Given two tables - employee and department. Wite SQL query to find the name of employee with max salary
   
   • Follow-up 1: Wite SQL query to find the name of employee with second max salary (covering corner cases like multiple employees have max and second max salary)
   • Follow-up 2: Write SQL query to print the max salary of each department

Round 3 (In-person with the Hiring Manager)

1. Write code to add given number of days to a given date in string format without using date functions. Should Handle leap year case as well

Round 4 (Online meeting with the Vice President)

1. Given the table employee_salary(eid, salary_credited, month)
   
   • Write SQL query to find employees with salary greater than 10,00,000
   • Write SQL query to find employees with total salary received so far greater than 50,00,000
2. Difference between where and having clause
3. Difference between mysql and postgreSQL
4. Design movie recommendation app. Write some code for user registration module
5. Where do you see yourself in 5 years?
6. Why are you leaving your current organization?

Verdict: Selected

However, I declined the offer as I got a better offer

Compensation details: https://leetcode.com/discuss/post/6833191/oracle-senior-application-engineer-hyder-wqdh/

Coding Rounds: Custom problems, not from leetcode, simple Round 1: Design Distributed LFU Cache Round 2: Design Distributed LRU Cache Round 3: Design Metrics and Monitoring System Behavioral Round

All these Design problems (Rounds 1,2,3) were System Design problems, like "design TinyURL". No they were not LeetCode coding problems. No they were not OOP design problems.

Screening Round, 60 minutes call.

Initial 15 minutes: Discussion about the team, past projects, current work etc.

Next 30 minutes: DSA question (LFU Cache) -> straightforward, no modification, did not expect it though. Who asks LC Hard for oracle, especially in a screening interview, which is elimination?

Next 10 minutes: Dry run, follow up about the question, follow up was basically just explaining how the LRU case will work in case of collisions

Final 5 minutes: My questions about the team and the work, etc.

Verdict: Got a reply from the recruiter 3 days after the interview that I passed this round.

Interviewer was very nice and friendly, however, was quite throughout when I was coding, so it was alarming.

Oracle Interview Experience - Senior Application Developer
The HR found the profile from Naukri. Received a call from HR for the onsite interviews.

Round 1 (onsite) -

Round 2 (onsite) -

Round 3 (onsite) -

Round 4 (virtual) -

Interview Experience at Oracle

1. Brief Introduction

I started the interview with a quick introduction about myself, my background, and my experience working with Java and data structures and algorithms.

2. Java/OOP Questions

The interviewer asked several Java questions centered around the four pillars of Object-Oriented Programming:

1. Encapsulation
2. Abstraction
3. Inheritance
4. Polymorphism

3. Data Structures & Algorithms (DSA) Questions

1. LeetCode 179: Largest Number
   • Problem: Given a list of non-negative integers, arrange them such that they form the largest number.
   • Link: LeetCode 179 – Largest Number
2. Symmetric Tree Check
   • Problem: Determine if a binary tree is symmetric in structure (ignoring node values).
3. Subset Sum Equal To K
   • Problem: Given a set of integers and a target sum K, determine if any subset of the integers sums to K.
   • Link: Code360 – Subset Sum Equal To K

4. SQL Question

Problem Statement:

Given an Employee table with the following schema:

Write a SQL query that, for a given employee name, returns all managers in the reporting hierarchy.

• Example 1: Input: E1 → Output: E2, E3, E4
• Example 2: Input: E5 → Output: E6

Hint: You may need to use a recursive common table expression (CTE) to traverse the hierarchy.

WITH RECURSIVE ManagerHierarchy AS (
  SELECT Employee, Manager
  FROM EmployeeTable
  WHERE Employee = 'E1'     -- Replace 'E1' with the desired employee
UNION ALL
SELECT e.Employee, e.Manager
FROM EmployeeTable e
INNER JOIN ManagerHierarchy mh
ON e.Employee = mh.Manager
)
SELECT Manager
FROM ManagerHierarchy;

These were the questions I encountered during my Oracle interview. Hope this helps others preparing for similar interviews!

Oracle Interview Experience – Software Engineer Role Round 1: Screening

DSA Question: Solved the Insert Delete GetRandom O(1) problem, focusing on achieving all operations in average constant time using a combination of HashMap and ArrayList. Project Discussion: Brief discussion on the current project, architecture, and key contributions. Design Patterns: Definitions and real-world implementation of core design patterns like Singleton, Factory, Observer, and Strategy were discussed. After this they schedules loop rounds. Round 2: System Design

Project Deep Dive: Explained the architecture, tech stack, and challenges of the current/previous project. High-Level Design: Designed a Healthcare Medicine Recommendation System that suggests medications based on a patient’s disease and medical history. Covered components like data ingestion, rule engine for recommendations, caching strategies, database schema, and handling scalability. Round 3: Data Structures & Algorithms

Leaders in Array Variant: Solved a variation of the classic "Leaders in an Array" problem. String Encoding Question: Given input like 12(2)3(2)10#, decoded it into abbcccj. Focus was on parsing and converting numerical and symbolic patterns into their corresponding characters. Round 4: Data Structures & Algorithms

Integer to Roman Conversion: Implemented a highly optimized solution for converting integers to Roman numerals without hardcoding mappings, leveraging arrays and modular logic. Round 5: Advanced DSA + System Design

Balanced BST Implementation: Implemented a Binary Search Tree with logic to rebalance the tree after every insertion and deletion (e.g., using AVL or Red-Black Tree concepts). System Design (HLD + Scalability Concepts): Deep discussion on: Scalability techniques Apache Kafka for event-driven architecture Circuit Breaker Pattern for fault tolerance Saga Pattern for managing distributed transactions in microservices

The interview focused on a system level design problem.

System Level Design

The hospital has multiple wards. Every ward has patients. Every ward is managed by a group of Nurses If a medicine is to be given to the patient, the nurse would do it. Doctors come to see patients check medicines, what new medicine to give, and cancel any existing medicine. Doctors use an app to place orders for medicine. Medicine A should 2 times a day to 3 patients (6 tasks) First day morning - evening

Nurse has a dashboard and see task that which medicine is to be given to the patient on time and mark the task as done.

There are 4 major parts we have in our system,

1. Order management system responsible for searching, modifying and canceling order.
2. An App to place, modify and regenerate orders.
3. Task management system, show which task is created.
4. Internal dashboard shows which task has done, yet to be done.

Scale: 10000 patients in one hospital There can be multiple hospitals as well in the city.

Design a High-Level System design supporting the below use case,

• Highly Scalable
• low latency
• Availability
• Fault Tolerant
• APIs Design
• Work-flow Design

I recently interviewed for the SMTS (Senior Member of Technical Staff) role at Oracle. Here's a breakdown of the process:

📍 Screening Round
Duration: 1 Hour

Format: Online Coding Test (Peer Programming)
Questions was similar to this problem.

Content:

2 LeetCode Medium-level DSA problems

Focus was on problem-solving skills and optimal solutions

Standard topics like Graphs, HashMaps, and Two Pointers

🔁 Loop Interviews (3 Rounds)
Round 1: DSA-Focused Round
Duration: 1 Hour

Format: Live Coding

Content:

Solved 2 LeetCode Medium questions

Interviewer focused on writing clean code and explaining time/space complexities

Follow-ups involved optimizing initial approaches

Round 2: System Design + DSA
Duration: 1 Hour (45 min System Design + 15 min DSA)

Format: Virtual Whiteboard/Discussion

Content:

System Design: Design a healthcare system for doctors and patients

Covered components, data flow, entities, APIs, scalability, and data consistency

DSA: One short LeetCode-style problem (more of a warm-up to wrap up the round)

Round 3: Director Round (Tech Deep Dive)
Duration: 1 Hour

Content:

In-depth discussion on current/past projects

Walked through architecture decisions, design trade-offs, scalability, and tech stack choices

Questions like "Why did you choose this design?", "How would you improve it?", "What challenges did you face?"

Company: Oracle
Role: SMTS (Senior Member of Technical Staff)
Experience: 3.10 YOE
Status: ✅ Offer Received

I recently interviewed for the SMTS (Senior Member of Technical Staff) role at Oracle. Here's a breakdown of the process:

📍 Screening Round

Duration: 1 Hour

Format: Online Coding Test (Peer Programming)
Questions was similar to this problem.

Content:

• 2 LeetCode Medium-level DSA problems
• Focus was on problem-solving skills and optimal solutions
• Standard topics like Graphs, HashMaps, and Two Pointers

🔁 Loop Interviews (3 Rounds)

Round 1: DSA-Focused Round

Duration: 1 Hour

Format: Live Coding

Content:

• Solved 2 LeetCode Medium questions
• Interviewer focused on writing clean code and explaining time/space complexities
• Follow-ups involved optimizing initial approaches

Round 2: System Design + DSA

Duration: 1 Hour (45 min System Design + 15 min DSA)

Format: Virtual Whiteboard/Discussion

Content:

• System Design: Design a healthcare system for doctors and patients
• Covered components, data flow, entities, APIs, scalability, and data consistency
• DSA: One short LeetCode-style problem (more of a warm-up to wrap up the round)

Round 3: Director Round (Tech Deep Dive)

Duration: 1 Hour

Content:

• In-depth discussion on current/past projects
• Walked through architecture decisions, design trade-offs, scalability, and tech stack choices
• Questions like "Why did you choose this design?", "How would you improve it?", "What challenges did you face?"

✅ Final Outcome

I’m happy to share that I received the offer 🎉

Here's the Offer Breakup for anyone interested in the compensation details.

Comp Details

Status: Experienced professional with 3.5 years in software development

Interview Process

First Round (Technical Zoom Call, 1 hour):

Assignment Questions:

One day before they provided a google doc with some SQL and Java implementation problem. So First 15 minutes was discussed on the solution of those problems

Logical Problem:

Problem: Find Top K Frequent Elements of an array

I solved this question and provided the optimized code

Second Round (Technical Zoom Call, 1 hour):

Behavioral Questions:

Asked about my current work role. A few general technical question based on my resume. Logical Problem:

Problem:

1. Find missing number in consecutive array of n+1 elements Solved Using Math Formula
2. Reverse a String Preserving space Solved with brute force
3. Queue Using 2 stacks Provided the approach--Not solved becuase time is over.

Verdict: Rejected After Second Round.

I recently had the opportunity to interview with Oracle for a software role, and it was a great learning experience! Here are some of the coding questions I encountered during the process:

1️⃣ Remove the minimum number of parentheses for a valid string

Given a string containing parentheses, the goal is to remove the minimum number of invalid parentheses to make the string valid. Hint:-The solution requires efficient use of stacks or DFS.
2️⃣ Stock Price Tracker

You are given a stream of records about a particular stock. Each record contains a timestamp and the corresponding price of the stock at that timestamp. You need to implement the Stock Price class that supports the following operations:
Update the price of the stock at a given timestamp.
Retrieve the latest stock price (price at the latest timestamp recorded).
Retrieve the maximum stock price recorded so far.
Retrieve the minimum stock price recorded so far.
Hint:-This problem can be efficiently solved using a combination of hash maps and priority queues.

3️⃣ Maximum Path Sum in a Binary Tree

Given a binary tree, find the path with the maximum sum. The path can start and end at any node.
Hint:- The solution involves a depth-first search (DFS) traversal while keeping track of the maximum sum encountered.

These questions tested my problem-solving skills, data structures, and algorithmic thinking. Overall, it was a great experience!

If you’re preparing for coding interviews, I highly recommend practicing these types of questions. Feel free to drop a comment if you have any thoughts or if you’ve faced similar challenges in your interviews!

#Oracle #InterviewExperience #CodingInterview #DataStructures #Algorithms #SoftwareEngineering

Years of Experience (YOE): 2.9 years

Round 1: Screening Round

Question 1: A prefix nums[0..i] is sequential if, for all 1 <= j <= i, nums[j] = nums[j - 1] + 1. In particular, the prefix consisting only of nums[0] is sequential. Return the smallest integer x missing from nums such that x is greater than or equal to the sum of the longest sequential prefix.

Input: nums = [1,2,3,2,5] Output: 6 Explanation: The longest sequential prefix of nums is [1,2,3] with a sum of 6. 6 is not in the array, therefore 6 is the smallest missing integer greater than or equal to the sum of the longest sequential prefix.

Input: nums = [3,4,5,1,12,14,13] Output: 15 Explanation: The longest sequential prefix of nums is [3,4,5] with a sum of 12. 12, 13, and 14 belong to the array while 15 does not. Therefore 15 is the smallest missing integer greater than or equal to the sum of the longest sequential prefix.

Question 2: https://leetcode.com/problems/asteroid-collision/description/

Round 2

Question 1: Median of Two Sorted Arrays – I was able to provide a solution using extra space. The interviewer was looking for a more optimal solution (without extra space), but he was okay with my approach and moved on to the next problem.

Question 2: https://leetcode.com/problems/palindrome-partitioning/description/ Was able to solve this completely

Round 3

This was supposed to be an LLD/Java round. The interviewer asked me to create a Spring Boot project with a proper folder and file structure. He asked me to create one for a BookMyShow app. Since I didn’t have much experience with Spring Boot, I couldn't create a very detailed app.

He was mainly interested in understanding the data flow and how it happens. Then, he moved on to API discussions and also discussed the same for my previous projects.

Round 4 (HM)

Started off with an introduction, followed by a resume-based discussion. Later, I was asked a few Java-related questions (Lambda, Streams, etc.).

At the end, he asked me one coding problem: Problem: Reverse each word in a sentence.

• I was asked to write the solution in Java.
• I coded it but took some time and required a few hints. Since I primarily do DSA in C++, I faced some syntax-related issues.

I reached out to the recruiter regarding feedback. She mentioned that my DSA/problem-solving skills were strong, but my design skills were weak. The team I was interviewing for was looking for more experienced candidates. However, the recruiter told me that she would refer me to another team, and I would have to go through the complete interview loop again for that team.

I had an interview experience for an IC2 position at Oracle OCI with 1.8 years of experience. The process involved multiple rounds, starting with a screening round that covered both coding and fundamental computer science concepts. This was followed by four 'Loop Rounds', which included technical discussions, system design, behavioral questions, and more coding challenges. I specifically remember being asked about my projects and on-call responsibilities in almost every round. In the end, I received an initial offer of 40LPA (27+13), but after I tried to negotiate for a higher compensation, the hiring manager decided to proceed with another candidate and withdrew the offer.

I recently had my first round (R1) interview for a Software Engineer (SE) role within the ERP team at Oracle. The interview covered a broad range of topics, including data structures and algorithms, core Java concepts, database queries, and system design principles. I was presented with several questions covering these areas during the round.

I recently had an on-site interview for a Senior Application Developer role at Oracle. The process consisted of three distinct rounds, each focusing on different aspects of my technical and problem-solving skills.

Round 1: Data Structures & Algorithms

• One problem was a classic dynamic programming problem, Kadane's Algorithm, asking for the maximum subarray sum.
• Another involved finding the longest sequence of ones in a binary string.
• I also had to determine the number of possible paths from the top-left to the bottom-right corner of an n*m grid, restricted to moving only right or down.
• There was a two-pointer question related to finding the minimum subarray size, but I can't recall the exact details of that one.
• Additionally, the interviewer asked several in-depth questions about my past projects and drilled into my resume.

Round 2: Problem Solving & System Design

• I was challenged with a scheduling question, specifically devising an intuition for scheduling classes for a school. This involved considering teacher availability, a fixed number of classes per day, and a total number of days, along with a variation if an additional section was added.
• A classic water jug puzzle was also posed: how to fill exactly 4 liters using 3-liter and 5-liter jugs.
• The round also included a system design question, where I needed to outline how I would design a multiplayer Snakes and Ladders game.

Round 3: Algorithms & Problem Solving

• One problem was described as a 'flight scheduling problem', though I don't remember the specifics.
• The other was the well-known Merging Intervals problem, where I needed to combine overlapping time intervals.

My interview journey with Oracle for a Java Developer position spanned 10 days, with each round serving as an elimination stage. A recruiter initially contacted me via Naukri.

Round 1: Online Assessment

This round featured two questions. I had to solve a coding problem and also demonstrate my ability to make a REST API call using Java, parsing the JSON response.

Round 2: F2F Interview (1 hour)

After two days, I received a call for the onsite interviews. For all these rounds, I had to write code on paper and explain my approach. This round covered:

• Coding: Printing all subsets with a given sum.
• Java Concepts: Exceptional Hierarchy, questions on strings (code snippets, string intern() method), and the differences between Final, Finally, and Finalize.
• One conceptual question: Can a try block be used without a catch block?

Round 3: F2F Interview (1 hour, same day)

This round was also focused on coding and some technical concepts:

• Coding: Adding two numbers represented by linked lists.
• Database: Finding the nth highest employee salary from a table, and finding the name of an employee with the Nth highest salary from a list.
• Front-end: What is AJAX?
• Coding: Identifying all leaders in an array of integers (an element is a leader if it's greater than all its right elements).

Round 4: F2F Interview (1.5 hours, same day)

This round delved deeper into design principles and advanced coding problems:

• Object-Oriented Programming: I explained all OOPs concepts with practical examples from my projects.
• Software Design: I explained SOLID principles with practical examples from my projects.
• Java Concepts: Exceptional hierarchy in detail (Error vs Exception, Checked vs Unchecked).
• Coding: Sorting two arrays (names and cities) based on names, then by city if names are equal.
• Coding: Printing array elements in an alternating high-low order (first highest, first smallest, second highest, second smallest, and so on).
• System Design: I explained steps involved from request to response.
• Database: How to optimize database performance.

Round 5: F2F Interview (2 hours)

After a two-day wait, I had my final and most extensive interview:

• Design Patterns: I explained and wrote code for design patterns I had worked with.
• Java Concepts: Exceptional hierarchy (again), questions on code snippets, constructors, serialization/deserialization in depth, String vs StringBuffer vs StringBuilder, functional interfaces, marker interfaces.
• Coding: Finding combinations of digits for a 3-digit integer that sum to a given value.
• Project Discussion: Several questions about my projects.
• Memory Management: Discussed memory management.
• Java Concepts: Abstract classes and interfaces in depth, including whether an abstract class must have at least one abstract method.

The verdict came after three days: I was selected! Oracle offered me the role of Applications Engineer with a fixed salary of 19 LPA, without bonuses or stocks. My previous experience was with TCS as a Java Spring Boot Developer with 2 years and 1 month of experience.

I participated in an on-campus interview experience for an Applications Engineer role at Oracle, which involved four distinct rounds, ultimately leading to a rejection.

Round 1: Online Assessment

The first round was an Online Assessment consisting of 20-30 MCQs and a single coding question. My coding question involved concepts from DSU (Disjoint Set Union) and mathematics, which I found to be of easy-medium difficulty, assuming a decent background in Competitive Programming/DSA.

Round 2: Technical Interview

This round began with my introduction. The interviewer then asked me to explain my Spring Boot application in depth. I was given two follow-up questions on how I would extend my project, which I answered by discussing potential changes to the underlying data structures while maintaining existing APIs. Following this, I was presented with a LeetCode medium question, Count Numbers with Unique Digits, which I solved using a DP approach, although I felt it might have been an overkill. I was also asked to rate my proficiency in Java and SQL, for which I gave myself ratings of 3.5 and 3 out of 5 respectively. The round concluded with several basic OOPS questions in Java, most of which I was able to answer.

Round 3: HR + Technical Interview

The third round was a combination of HR and technical questions. I was asked to briefly describe my three years of college and discuss the projects listed on my resume, including a formal LOP project on Blockchain+DL. I faced follow-up questions regarding my use of REST APIs, which I answered, though not with complete confidence. The interviewer also inquired about my post-college plans, my programming frequency, and when I started programming. Towards the end, I was challenged to design the direct chat and group chat features for WhatsApp. I responded by outlining functional and non-functional requirements and detailing the necessary data structures, such as map<int,pair<int,string> > for direct chat and map<int,pair<vector<int> , string>> for group chat.

Round 4: Technical Interview

This final technical round started unexpectedly with a question about whether I watch the Olympics. I was then asked to describe myself in terms of education, skills, and inspiration. The conversation quickly shifted to a complex, open-ended problem concerning a Lot Management System, providing a DB schema (Lot_ID, LotGrade, LotExpirationDate, LotStatus, Miscellaneous).

I was posed several questions based on this system:

1. How to determine the industry a Lot belongs to by analyzing the 'Miscellaneous' column. I suggested using NLP techniques to extract strings, feeding them into an RNN network, and potentially clustering based on 'LotExpirationDate' or using another ANN layer for improved accuracy.
2. How the organization could efficiently obtain a median 'LotExpirationDate' for all consumers, considering industry variations. Initially, I proposed extracting all expiration dates relative to the current time and finding the median, with a fallback to the mean if the median was too close to current or expiration dates. When the interviewer pointed out the database's large size, I adapted my solution, suggesting the use of NoSQL databases specifically for expiration times. I would create clusters based on expiration durations, then operate within these groups, applying ML heuristics to identify patterns, reasoning that industries like bakery and restaurant (both food) might have similar (LotExpirationDate - currentDate) values.
3. How to implement a feature allowing customers full control over setting 'LotExpirationDate' and receiving automatic expiration notifications. I presented two approaches:
   • If an existing customer database with previous records was available, I would use the 'Miscellaneous' attribute to guess the industry, retrieve its threshold duration from the database, and send it to the customer.
   • If no existing database, I would conduct unit testing on a sample of customers to identify patterns and then extrapolate these insights to a wider audience.

The round concluded with me describing all three rounds and what I learned from each.

Ultimately, I received a rejection.

I went through a total of three interview rounds for the Full-Time Engineer position at Oracle in their Server Technology division.

Technical Round 1

Technical Round 2

Technical + HR Round

Outcome

I recently appeared for an IC2 role at Oracle OCI. With 2.5 years of experience at a product-based MNC, I applied through their career portal and went through a total of five, one-hour rounds: one screening, two technical, and two managerial.

Screening Round: Technical

Two interviewers started with introductions and discussed the projects I had worked on, focusing on schema and API exposures. They then gave me a coding question, which was a variation of Group Anagrams, requiring me to handle any symbols. I presented my solution, which seemed to convince the interviewer.

A week later, I received positive feedback and was scheduled for four more interview rounds. I took 1.5 days off from my current organization for this.

First Round: Technical

This round was with an interviewer who had 10 years of experience. It began with an introduction and deep dive into my projects. He gave me a coding question: Next Greater Element I. I asked if we should discuss it first or if I should just write code, and when he suggested he could ask another question if I knew this one, I truthfully replied I didn't. I first proposed an O(n^2) approach and then refined it to a stack-based approach.

He then asked some general questions:

1. How do you handle production issues?
2. How do you ensure production issues don't impact clients for a prolonged time?

With time remaining, he asked another coding question: Search a 2D Matrix II. I knew the optimized solution. I started by explaining the O(m*n) approach, then O(n log m), and was about to present the most optimized solution when he asked to move on, given the time. I regret not pushing for a few more minutes, as I was confident in my knowledge, but he seemed convinced. The interview ended early, and I had a chance to ask my questions.

Second Round: Technical

The interviewer was very supportive. We started with introductions, and he mentioned that 30 minutes would be for a coding challenge and the remaining 30 minutes for system design. The coding question was Shortest Path in Binary Matrix. For system design, he asked for an LLD of Cricbuzz, mainly focusing on the schema.

Third Round: Managerial

This round was with a manager. We started with introductions and then a thorough discussion of my projects. She then asked a lot of scenario-based questions:

1. Is there any colleague who inspires you?
2. Can you describe a significant technical challenge you faced?
3. Can you recall a scenario when your boss changed, and how you handled it?
4. Have you ever missed a deadline? How did you handle it?
5. How do you handle changes in work priorities?
6. Why are you switching jobs?

She also gave a coding question, which was a variation of Merge Intervals. I first provided a brute-force solution and then moved to the most optimized approach.

At the end, I asked a question about the stage of Oracle Cloud, to which she seemed slightly taken aback and suggested I could Google it, confirming it was fully fledged with many clients. I realize now I should have phrased my question better.

Fourth Round: Managerial

This round involved introductions and an in-depth grilling of my resume. Again, there were many scenario-based questions. I was asked to write code for merge sort and also to replicate a deadlock using threads.

At the end, I asked for feedback. He mentioned I was good at coding but needed to learn beyond day-to-day work, such as DevOps. He was from a DevOps team, and my lack of extensive DevOps knowledge might have been a factor.

After a long time, this was a comprehensive interview process, and I made a few mistakes. However, completing all rounds, I felt a sense of self-worth and capability.

A week later, I heard positive feedback, and HR discussed salary, location, and other details, stating it would take 10-12 days to release an offer letter after email approval. Unfortunately, I later learned the position was put on hold, possibly due to my 90-day notice period. I will update this post if I hear back.

My interview journey with Oracle began after receiving a call from a recruiter. I have about 5 years of experience, working as an SDE2 at a multi-national company. The recruiter informed me that the initial technical screening would be an elimination round, and passing it would lead to a full onsite loop of five additional rounds.

1st Round: Tech Screening

After initial introductions, the interviewer presented a dynamic programming question that was conceptually similar to the subset sum problem. It wasn't a direct copy, so I had to identify the underlying pattern to devise a solution. I managed to solve it completely, working through a few base case issues. Following that, a behavioral question was posed, and then we moved into system design, where I was asked to suggest improvements for a system the interviewer described.

Onsite Loop Interviews:

Round 1 (Technical)

The first question in this round was a warm-up, an easy LeetCode-level problem related to tree traversals. After that, another behavioral question was asked. The final technical question was to search in a rotated sorted array. I successfully solved both of these questions.

Round 2 (Hiring Manager)

I had anticipated this to be a system design round, but it turned out to be with a hiring manager. This round focused heavily on behavioral questions. We had an in-depth discussion about my past projects, my specific contributions, and various situational questions. I was also asked to draw out the system design for my current project and later suggest an improvement or change to a system.

Bar Tender Round (Senior Director)

This round, taken by a Senior Director, was a very pleasant experience. We had a good discussion about my work portfolio as detailed in my resume. Again, many behavioral questions were asked, and we discussed my current project and my contributions in detail.

System Design Round

After brief introductions and a few questions about my current project, I was tasked with designing a payment system at a high level. The interviewer also wanted to know what changes I would implement in the system to handle high traffic.

A few days later, the recruiter informed me that the debrief outcome was positive, and they would proceed with the offer rollout process.

My interview experience for the Application Software Developer role at Oracle primarily focused on a technical question. The problem presented to me involved analyzing an unsorted array to determine the longest consecutive sequence within it, with specific constraints regarding sorting and duplicate handling.

My interview journey for the Applications Engineer IC2 position at Oracle began with a HackerRank Online Assessment. This round, lasting about an hour, included one medium difficulty DSA problem, several questions on trees, and some aptitude questions.

The second round was an onsite interview at Oracle's Bangalore office, which lasted approximately two hours. This round started with an in-depth discussion about my projects and previous experience. The interviewer then delved into a variety of technical questions, including the famous LeetCode problem 'Binary Tree Cameras,' how to implement authentication between two microservices, tricky SQL questions, understanding the 'merge' statement, database triggers, explaining sharding and partitioning, locking in SQL, and the 'with' clause. Since I mentioned JavaScript in my experience, there was also a JavaScript-based question. A medium-difficulty puzzle from GeeksforGeeks was also part of this round. Additionally, there were standard Spring Boot questions, covering different types of annotations, and questions about Tomcat and JVM.

Finally, I had the third round, which was with the Hiring Manager, conducted via a Zoom call for about an hour. This round focused heavily on project-based discussions. Questions related to Kafka and Redis were asked because I had mentioned them on my resume. There were also questions on basic encryption/decryption techniques and the differences between SSL and TLS. This round involved more project-related grilling. I was ultimately SELECTED for the role.

I applied for a position on the Oracle portal, and a recruiter reached out to me. The scheduling process was smooth, but I didn't receive much information about what to expect in the interviews.

My first round was focused on Object-Oriented Programming (OOP). I was asked to write code to design a game and its player characters. The interviewer was primarily interested in my approach to designing classes, subclasses, and methods, rather than the specific game logic itself.

Following that, I had a series of onsite virtual loops:

• Round 1 (IC4 from another team): This was a 1-hour technical round. I spent about 50 minutes on a LeetCode medium problem, which was related to arrays and stacks. The remaining 10 minutes were for Q&A.
• Round 2 (Sr. PM from another team): This 1-hour round was entirely behavioral, focusing on my working style and past experiences.
• Round 3 (Hiring Manager): A shorter 35-minute session with the Hiring Manager. We discussed team fit for about 20 minutes, followed by 15 minutes for my questions.
• Round 4 (IC5): Another 1-hour technical round. I spent about 40 minutes on a LeetCode medium problem involving a tree structure. The first 10 minutes were for intro and behavioral questions, and the last 10 minutes for Q&A.
• Round 5 (IC4): This was a 1 hour and 10 minutes round. After a 5-minute introduction, I spent 55 minutes on a specific LeetCode medium problem, Minimum Area Rectangle. The remaining 10 minutes were for Q&A.

I noticed that the LeetCode questions I encountered were not from the commonly tagged Oracle list on LeetCode.

My interview journey for the Project Intern position at Oracle OFSS began with an Online Assessment hosted on Hackerrank. This round consisted of 20 multiple-choice questions covering aptitude and reasoning, along with one easy-medium LeetCode problem and an API problem similar to those found on Hackerrank.

The first Technical Round started with my self-introduction. The interviewer then delved into Java, asking about my knowledge and why it's a popular language. We also covered standard Computer Science concepts such as Object-Oriented Programming (OOP), with specific questions on explaining Encapsulation with an example, Polymorphism, and exception handling. A significant portion of this round was dedicated to discussing the projects listed on my resume, which meant I wasn't asked to solve any data structures and algorithms problems directly. However, I know a friend was asked an easy LeetCode problem in this same round.

Finally, the second HR Round again involved discussions about my projects. I was asked classic behavioral questions like "Why do you want to work at Oracle?", "What are your strengths and weaknesses?", and "Why should we hire you?". Additionally, some basic ECE (Electronics and Communication Engineering) related questions were posed.

The verdict was positive: I was selected! Out of more than 450 students who took the Online Assessment, only 6 were shortlisted for interviews, and I was the sole candidate selected.