Summary
I recently interviewed for a Data Engineer position at Urban Company with 2 years of experience. The process included an assignment and a domain knowledge interview, but unfortunately, I was ultimately rejected.
Full Experience
My interview journey with Urban Company started after I received a call from their HR department for a Data Engineer opportunity.
The first step was an assignment that I needed to complete within a day. It involved building a Lightweight MySQL ORM Layer with Dual Write Support. This task tested my practical coding and database interaction skills.
Following the assignment, I was invited for a 'Domain Knowledge Interview.' In this round, the discussion revolved around various data engineering concepts and systems. We delved into topics like Kafka, Change Data Capture (CDC), and real-time streaming architectures. There was no discussion about the assignment during this round.
Despite my performance in the interview, the verdict was rejection.
Interview Questions (4)
Design a user clickstream data pipeline. Explain how to fetch and store this data, clarify why direct writing to S3 is not feasible, and justify the use of Kafka as an initial data ingestion layer.
Describe your approach to exposing OLAP data through an API for consumption by microservices. Additionally, explain how you would build and expose real-time dashboards based on this data.
Explain how your company manages Data Governance.
Discuss Kafka architecture and how you would handle increased data size and scaling challenges.
Summary
I participated in Urban Company's on-campus recruitment drive, which included an Online Assessment, two Data Structures & Algorithms rounds, a System Design round, and a final technical discussion. Despite making it through multiple rounds, I was ultimately rejected without specific feedback.
Full Experience
I recently went through the on-campus interview process at Urban Company. The selection process began with an Online Assessment that lasted 90 minutes and consisted of three questions.
The first question in the OA was Rotting Oranges. The second one was Course Schedule II. The third problem was a unique challenge: 'Given a 2D array of size N x M, where each cell contains either '0' or '1', find the number of paths from the cell (0,0) to the cell (N-1,M-1) such that the sequence formed by the cells is a Palindrome.' A hint was provided: 'Meet in the Middle', with constraints N, M <= 15.
After clearing the OA, I proceeded to Interview Round 1. This was a 60-minute DSA round where I had to code two questions on Google Docs. I completely solved Decode Ways 2. For the second question, House Paint 3, I could only discuss the approach and provide pseudocode for the optimal solution.
Next was Interview Round 2, a 60-minute System Design round. My task was to design a Proctored Exam System. I worked on sketching out the ER Diagram and defining the necessary classes. The interviewer was friendly and offered helpful hints, which was very encouraging.
The final round, Interview Round 3, involved an in-depth discussion about my hackathon project, focusing on the design decisions I made. We also touched upon various concepts like CDN, DNS, GeoDNS, and the advantages and disadvantages of DBMS normalization.
Unfortunately, the final verdict was a Rejection, and I did not receive any feedback regarding my performance.
Interview Questions (6)
Standard LeetCode problem. Given a grid where each cell can be empty (0), a fresh orange (1), or a rotten orange (2). Every minute, any fresh orange that is 4-directionally adjacent to a rotten orange becomes rotten. Determine the minimum time until no fresh oranges remain. If it's impossible, return -1.
Standard LeetCode problem. There are a total of numCourses courses you have to take, labeled from 0 to numCourses - 1. You are given an array prerequisites where prerequisites[i] = [ai, bi] indicates that you must take course bi first if you want to take course ai. Return the ordering of courses you should take to finish all courses. If there are many valid answers, return any of them. If it is impossible to finish all courses, return an empty array.
Given a 2D array of size N x M. Each cell contains either '0' or '1'. Find the number of paths from cell (0,0) to cell (N-1,M-1), such that the sequence formed by the cells is a Palindrome. Movement is restricted to right or down. Constraints: N, M <= 15. The problem provided a hint: 'Meet in the Middle'.
A message containing letters from 'A'-'Z' can be encoded into numbers using the mapping: 'A' -> '1', 'B' -> '2', ..., 'Z' -> '26'. Additionally, the character '' can represent any digit from '1' to '9'. Given an encoded message containing digits and the '' character, return the number of ways to decode it. Since the answer may be very large, return it modulo 10^9 + 7.
This is likely a variant of the 'Paint House' problem series. While the exact problem statement was not fully provided, these problems generally involve finding the minimum cost to paint a row of houses with specific constraints, such as no two adjacent houses having the same color, or achieving a certain 'target neighborhood' configuration.
The task was to design an online system for conducting proctored examinations. This involved creating an Entity-Relationship (ER) Diagram to model the database schema and defining the main classes for the system's architecture.