Summary
I interviewed for an IC3/SMTS role at Oracle (Cerner), which involved DSA and System Design rounds. I was able to clear the interviews and was selected.
Full Experience
Round 1: DSA (Screening round)
- https://leetcode.com/problems/max-consecutive-ones-iii/description/
- https://leetcode.com/problems/capacity-to-ship-packages-within-d-days/description/
Loop rounds(5 rounds)
Round 1:
DSA: 1 question on hackerrank (don't remember the question but it was based on array and I was not able to give optimal solution), then discussion around the current project architecture and spring boot advance features.
Round 2:
System design: Design twitter like system, follow up questions on scaling, load balancing, latency of tweeter feed and search, database schema design related question.
At the end interviewe asked about current role, contribution end to end, challenges faced and how I handled them.
Round 3:
System design: Design ecommerce like application (amazon or flipkart)
In depth discussion on the search feature of the application
like search optimization using elastic search, various authentication mechanisms for the application.
Round 4:
System/Architecture design: The interivewer asked me to design my current project's architecture.
It was sort of like system design, whole interview revoled around the architcture I created.
round 5:
DSA: question 1 : Given list of jumps that the frog can make sequentially on stairs(could have negative value) starting at stair 1 give the smallest stair no. the frog has to be on so that jumping all the jumps will still keep the frog on positive stair no.
eg: jumps:[-5,1,2,1-6] : output : 8
1≤ stairs<10^5
Was able to to solve using binary search, did optimization after a hint
Hint: if we start with smallest stair say x (smallest value = 1) and every time the result dips below 0 you add that value back in x that way x will always be smallest value, TC would be O(n) by this approach
DSA: question 2 : Given encoding of the string give the count of each character from 0 to 25, eg: abcd → incoded as input : “1234” : output: [1,1,1,1,0,0,0....0], eg: aabbz → intput: 1(2)2(2)25# : output: [2,2,0,0,....,1]
# tells two digits should taken into consideration together like 25# for z, 24# for y, etc.
Was able to solve this by iterating from right to left, missed few edge cases though, that I fixed later on.
Was selected:
here is the compensation details: https://leetcode.com/discuss/post/6745601/oraclecerner-smts-may-2025-bangaluru-by-9me9j/
Interview Questions (7)
Design a Twitter-like system. Follow-up questions included discussions on scaling, load balancing, latency of Twitter feed and search, and database schema design. Additionally, I was asked about my current role, end-to-end contributions, challenges faced, and how I handled them.
Design an e-commerce-like application (similar to Amazon or Flipkart). In-depth discussion focused on the search feature of the application, including search optimization using Elastic Search and various authentication mechanisms.
I was asked to design the architecture of my current project. The entire interview revolved around the architecture I presented.
Given a list of jumps that the frog can make sequentially on stairs (could have negative value), starting at stair 1, find the smallest stair number the frog has to be on so that jumping all the jumps will still keep the frog on a positive stair number. Example: jumps: [-5, 1, 2, 1, -6] → output: 8. Constraints: 1 ≤ stairs < 10^5.
Given an encoded string, provide the count of each character from 'a' to 'z' (represented as 0 to 25). Examples:
- Input: '1234' → Output: [1,1,1,1,0,0,0....0] (for 'abcd')
- Input: '1(2)2(2)25#' → Output: [2,2,0,0,....,1] (for 'aabbz')
Summary
I was asked to design a high-level AI note-making system for hospitals to automate doctor-patient conversations, summarize notes, and generate prescriptions, focusing on backend components.
Full Experience
High Level Desigh Problem (Backend role)
Suppose I am going into the hospital as a patient and want to visit a doctor. The hospital makes an appointment for me. They also ask for any ongoing problems I might have like the history of me. In a 1:1 session with the Doctor, he needs to take all the notes during the conversation with me. And then finally the doctor gave me a prescription based on the notes.
We need to automate the above system by building an AI note-making system for hospitals for conversations between doctors and patients.
We need a conversational AI system that understands who is doctor, patient, make a summarized note of the conversation and also make the prescription details told by the doctor.
Give me a High-Level System design for this problem, including but not limited to, API, Database, Services, The Scale of deployment, and other things required to fulfill this requirement.
Interview Questions (1)
High Level Desigh Problem (Backend role)
Suppose I am going into the hospital as a patient and want to visit a doctor. The hospital makes an appointment for me. They also ask for any ongoing problems I might have like the history of me. In a 1:1 session with the Doctor, he needs to take all the notes during the conversation with me. And then finally the doctor gave me a prescription based on the notes.
We need to automate the above system by building an AI note-making system for hospitals for conversations between doctors and patients.
We need a conversational AI system that understands who is doctor, patient, make a summarized note of the conversation and also make the prescription details told by the doctor.
Give me a High-Level System design for this problem, including but not limited to, API, Database, Services, The Scale of deployment, and other things required to fulfill this requirement.