Target Interviews

My interview journey with Target for a Backend Engineer-L4 position began when a recruiter reached out to me on LinkedIn. The entire process took about 25 days from the initial contact to the final verdict.

Online Assessment

The online assessment consisted of three coding questions:

1. A straightforward question involving simple loops and if-else conditions.
2. A problem where I needed to find numbers divisible by sqrt(n) within a given range [L, R], for which a stack-based solution was expected.
3. A dynamic programming problem that was a variation of the classic minDistance string problem.

Technical Interview Round 1 (60 minutes)

This round focused on a mix of DSA, system design, and theoretical concepts:

1. I was given a DSA question on performing a zig-zag traversal of a binary tree.
2. There was a quick discussion on designing an E-commerce site, though it didn't delve into deep discussions beyond my initial design explanation.
3. I faced several theoretical questions covering topics like SOLID principles, the CAP theorem, and key considerations for upgrading Java from version 8 to 17.
4. Finally, I was asked how I would sort all strings starting with a specific character 'c' within a List<String> strList using only Java streams.

Technical Interview Round 2 (60 minutes)

This round was purely dedicated to system design. I was tasked with designing a Personalized Promotion System. This involved gathering all requirements, providing rough API contracts, explaining my choice of database and why, and illustrating with sample database contracts. This round extended by about 10 minutes due to the engaging discussion.

Hiring Manager Round (45 minutes)

The final round with the hiring manager covered various aspects:

1. I provided a high-level overview of my current organization's projects.
2. I answered multiple STAR-based behavioral questions.
3. We discussed the differences and use cases for RDBMS versus NoSQL databases.
4. I shared my exposure to AI technologies.
5. I talked about my contributions and responsibilities within my present team.
6. Lastly, there was a discussion about my current compensation details.

I was happy to receive the final verdict of "Selected" after the entire process.

My interview journey for the Software Engineer L4 role at Target India began with an Online Assessment. This round consisted of three questions: two were LeetCode medium-level Data Structures & Algorithms problems, and the third was a problem that required knowledge of locks or the synchronized keyword.

The second round was a combination of Data Structures & Algorithms (DSA) and Low-Level Design (LLD). For the DSA part, I was given the "Sort Colors" problem. In the remaining 20 minutes, we discussed a System Design problem to create an ATM. This involved outlining the requirements, identifying key entities, and sketching their UML diagram.

Following this, the third round again focused on DSA and LLD. The DSA question was "House Robber". Interestingly, the interviewer asked me to open LeetCode and show my last submission for this problem. The LLD part of this round involved designing the low-level architecture for a platform similar to Stack Overflow.

The final round was with the Hiring Manager. This round was primarily behavioral and project-focused. The interviewer asked me about my most recent project, a significant bug I had fixed in the last month, and my motivations for wanting to join Target. We also discussed how I integrate AI into my daily work, and since I manage a microservice, how I ensure its regular monitoring. Finally, I was asked about any new technical skillsets I've acquired outside of my daily responsibilities and specific design patterns I've implemented in my past projects.

Overall, I felt the technical DSA and LLD rounds went quite well. However, I believe I could have performed better in the Hiring Manager round.

I had my interviews with Target today after completing the Online Assessment previously. All the interviews were scheduled for a single day.

Round 1 - DSA + LLD
This round focused on Data Structures & Algorithms and Low-Level Design.
1. Rotten Oranges: I was given the classic problem of finding the minimum time for all fresh oranges to rot in a grid.
2. Design Notification system LLD: I was asked to design a notification system at a low level, focusing on its various components and interactions.

Round 2 - HLD
This round was centered around High-Level Design.
1. Design Distributed Logging System: I was tasked with designing a distributed logging system, discussing its architecture and key considerations.

I was ultimately rejected after the second round. I didn't actually have a strong desire to join Target, but I used this experience as a crucial mock interview for upcoming, more significant opportunities. It was a valuable learning experience, and it clearly showed me that I need to dedicate more focus to improving my High-Level Design (HLD) and Low-Level Design (LLD) skills.

Round 1 was a technical coding and project-related round. I was given several SQL queries to solve, including counting active projects, calculating the average number of days to complete a project, finding employees not part of any active project, and identifying employees with the maximum salary within each project. I also had to write a Python function to find the longest common prefix among an array of strings. The SQL queries required a good understanding of joins, subqueries, and aggregate functions. The Python question tested my knowledge of string manipulation and loops.

Round 2 focused more on project-related topics and technologies specific to Target's internal Hadoop platform. The questions were about migration, real-time scenarios, data handling, and data transformations. This round was more about understanding how data flows within the system and how to handle various data processing challenges. It required a solid grasp of big data technologies and practical experience with data pipelines.

👨‍💻 Background

• College: Tier 2
• Graduation Year: 2023
• Experience: 2 years in software development
• Current Company: Société Générale
• Tech Stack: Java, Spring Boot, Microservices, SQL, Unix, etc.

📅 Interview Timeline

• Applied Via: Referral
• Response Time: 2 days
• Recruiter Call: Informed about face-to-face rounds at Manyata Tech Park (No Online Assessment)
• Total Rounds: 4
• Technical Round 1
• Technical Round 2
• Hiring Manager Round
• Technical Round 3 (Virtual)

🔍 Round 1: Technical Interview 1

• Format: Coding + Resume-based (Scenario-based)
• Duration: 1.5 hrs
• Interviewers: 2 (but one drove 95% of the round)
• Topics Covered:
  • DSA: Tower of Hanoi, Kth largest from stream
  • Microservices, REST API, Java, Spring Boot, React
  • SQL: Two simple queries
  • Java Stream API
• Difficulty: Moderate
• 📝 Thoughts: Answered most questions confidently. Positive start.

💡 Round 2: Low-Level Design

• Format: Whiteboard System Design + Resume discussion
• Duration: 1 hr
• Interviewer: Senior Engineer
• Topics:
  • Design Uber-like Ride Booking Service
  • Deep dive into current application at work
• Difficulty: Moderate
• 📝 Thoughts: Interview went well, felt like I impressed them.

💬 Round 3: Hiring Manager Interview

• Format: STAR-based managerial + tech conversation
• Duration: 20 mins
• Interviewers: 2 (One shadowing, one active HM)
• Topics Covered:
  • Microservices, DBMS, Java, Spring Boot
  • Behavioral:
    • How do you stay motivated?
    • What are you learning currently?
• Difficulty: Hard (Very in-depth, some unfamiliar concepts)
• 📝 Thoughts: Managed about 70–80% well. Room for improvement in depth.

💬 Round 4: Technical Interview (Virtual)

• Format: Coding + Scenario-based questions
• Duration: 1 hr
• Interviewer: Lead Engineer
• Topics Covered:
  • DSA: Three Sum, Union of sorted arrays
  • Java Streams, REST APIs, Multithreading
  • Design an API: Fetch external data, check DB existence
  • Debugging multithreading scenarios
• Difficulty: Moderate
• 📝 Thoughts: Strong performance, but stumbled discussing a feature built by a teammate that I included on my resume.

🎯 Offer & Reflections

• Outcome: Rejected
• Lesson Learned: Never list a resume feature you can't explain in-depth
• Final Thoughts:
  • Extremely positive experience overall
  • Interviewers and recruiter were genuinely respectful and supportive
  • Left the process more confident and self-aware

Hello Everyone, I got this opportunity through referal.

Round 1 - HM (15 min) This was a basic discussion with Hiring manager of what I worked on which projects I worked on. Basic design pattern question.

After this I got a call from recruiter that I've cleared the round.

Round 2 - Pair Programming(1.5 Hours)

The interviewer has given me a file where I need to find bug and solve the project removing all errors and apply SOLID principle. She asked basic design patterns question, SOLID principles, OOPS concept in the end.

Feedback - Few implementation practices needs to be worked on yet.

Verdict - Rejected

All the rounds happened in single day face to face at there banglore office

Current Comp: 16.5 in a startup based in banglore
current YOE: 2
Tech stack: MERN + Golang

1st Fullstack round
- Basic DSA on pen and paper
- Basic React questions on hooks, states, redux
- Backend questions on httpcode, cache, streaming
- question on mongo aggretation pipeline and postgres query
- Discussion based on resume

2nd round System design and Problem solving
- Asteroid collision variant (solved via stack)
- A question on binary search
- LLD on billing software of Vending machine

3rd Round Hiring Manager round
- Basic questions on scaling systems in production
- General leadership question and non tech


After clearing all the rounds they rejected me stating lack of java , springboot exp as i mostly worked in Node.js+Ts and golang in my backend, HR tried to match my profile with other teams but no resp after that

About me: SDE2 working at Fintech

Position Applied for: SSE

Round 1: This was mixed of DSA + LLD kind of round DSA question was eay-medium related to Strings LLD question: Design Lift management only Classes, Interfaces interaction and Entity schema was discussed Some Java questions on Concurrency, Streams and Memory management Design patterns discussion on Singleton, Stategy and Decorator

Round2: HLD design round - In depth Project Discussion I was asked to explain the current project architure. Why the certains decisions are made. How could you improve the design. If any new requirement comes then how would you integrate it. DB concurrency aspect: Different Isolation levels SQL vs NoSQL when to choose what, why the specific DB was choosen CAP theorem Kafka In-depth Discussions - How topic, partitions, consumer groups work. What if consumer goes down. What if topic storage is full. Some REST APIs Aspect - How does HTTP work, How to design a REST API, Best REST APIs principles to follow Expection Handling discussion Cache Discussion

Round 3: HM Round In-Depth discussion on Project Senario based questions Eg: Any production bug that kept you engaged for very long, but solution was quick. What did you learn from it How to handle conflcits between proposed design solution and so on..

Overall I say, it was really good experience. Interviwers were very knowlegable and they were ready to help if you are stuck

B.Tech - Tier 3 Years of Experience: 6.7 years Current Role: Software Engineer at a Ecomm

Round 1: Screening round Had a call with hiring manager. She asked me about my current project, role and responsibilities, system design related questions.

Round 2: Pair programming Interviewer shared screen and gave me a use case with some corrupted txt file. I had to read this txt file line by line and handle few cases. Later she asked me to optimize the code which was already written. Asked me spring boot related questions, design questions, design patterns

Round 3: Design round(HLD) Design an API for an Order Management System (OMS) used by a retail e-commerce. The system should:

• Accept new orders via REST API
• Persist order data.
• Publish order events to Kafka for downstream consumers (like fulfillment, inventory services) Functional Requirements**

1. Create Order API
   • Accepts customer ID, list of item IDs with quantities and payment mode
   • Validates and persists order in PostgreSQL
   • Publishes order event to Kafka (topic: orders)
2. Get Order Status API
   • Returns current status of the order. Non-Functional Requirements

• Scalability: System should handle spikes in traffic during events (e.g., sales)
• High Availability: APIs should have minimal downtime
• Eventual Consistency: Between PostgreSQL and Redis/Kafka
• Security: Only authorised users can place or view orders
• Performance: Get Order Status should return in <100ms for P99
• Observability: System should be traceable (logs, metrics, alerts)

All the interviews took place in their office in one day. Each interview panel was of 2 people.

1st Round:

• Questions on resume
• The project that I am currently working on in curr company
• Some questions on how would I handle certain scenarios such as bottlenecks
• DSA problem: Product of array except self(Brute->Optimal), was asked to handle edge cases and where would my code fail(-ve TC)
• Questions on Java Streams, Given an integer array, separate odd and even elements using a single stream.

The round went very well.

2nd Round:

• Started with asking: "Give any two scenarios where you did something and you were very proud of"
• Then went on to project discussion
• Why Redis and not in-memory K,V storage?
• A detailed discussion on Kafka and MQ in general
• Then I was asked which DS will I use to solve -> Find the nearest driver when a request comes when someone books a ride in Uber/Lyft.
• Again, detailed discussion around the project that I was working on in the company.
• Java Streams + Lambda discussion.

This round also went well.

3rd Round(HM):

• This was taken by Director + Senior EM
• Started with introduction
• Detailed discussion on the current project
• Was asked the Java version + Framework that I work in, and was asked to code something which I code in my company. (this is where I fumbled).
• Then their questions revolved around Java+SpringBoot+JPA, and they empasized on writing the code on pen and paper.
• Then a question which was expected to be solved by Java Streams, which I also bombed.
• Then they asked 2 sum problem, I went on from Brute force -> Sorting -> Optimal using HashMaps to which they said there might be millions of data and was asked not to use HashMap to which I said Sorting one was the most optimal.
• Then they asked why I wanted to switch etc etc for the last 2 mins.

I did not expect such in depth technical questions for HM round as well which I bombed and I knew this was the deal breaker for them, HR told it will be a general culture fit round and after a tiring day of offline interviews I felt like I could not have done any better.

I got rejection mail the next day, I really wanted to be a part of such a nice organization. All the people were so nice and warm throughout the interviews.

Hope this helps!