Apple | ICT3 | India | 2025 | Reject
Summary
I interviewed for an ICT3 role at Apple in India, completing six rounds covering technical skills in Spark, SQL, DSA, System Design, and React. Despite providing solutions for some problems, including a LeetCode problem with a twist, I received a generic rejection email.
Full Experience
I received a message from a linkedin recruiter . Recruiter was looking for people who have worked with Spark .
1. HM - hiring manager round focused on prior experience . 1 technical question . If you have an SQL query which is taking a lot of time . how will you debug . WHat all will you check i said location of the DB server . Check SQL plan . Check indexes.
2. HM- Another similar round focused on prior experience . 1 technical question . Why use columnar DBs over other database . What excites you to come to work everyday . 3. DSA round- similar to this https://leetcode.com/problems/remove-duplicates-from-sorted-array/description/ . with the twist that max K similar is allowed . 4. HM Another work experience round - Some questions on spark and alternatives . All work history rounds were in depth questions to check if you have really worked on them Questions like . What all alternatives were there . Why did you choose this . How does it help to scale etc etc . 5. Full stack round- I wasn't prepared for questions on react since haven't worked on it for 3 years . Frontend questions on react like use effect , hooks . Some of them went above my head :) . then a question . Given a function which returns a shallow copy of a object in json format . Take an oject as input and return a deep copy of the object . you can only use the function . DSA question - https://leetcode.com/problems/meeting-rooms-ii/description/ . I was seeing this for the first time . gave the correct solution using Priority Queue but then the interviewer said that the hours are fixed from 1 to 24 . Wasn't able to come up with the exact solution but came close . 6. System design round - How to scale an application from 100 to 1 million requests per second
No feedback . Generic rejection mail
Interview Questions (7)
If you have an SQL query which is taking a lot of time. How will you debug? What all will you check?
Why use columnar DBs over other database?
What excites you to come to work everyday?
Similar to LeetCode's Remove Duplicates from Sorted Array, but with the twist that a maximum of K similar elements are allowed in the array.
Given a function which returns a shallow copy of an object in JSON format. Take an object as input and return a deep copy of the object. You can only use the given shallow copy function.
The problem is Meeting Rooms II, but with the additional constraint that the hours are fixed from 1 to 24.
Design a system to scale an application from 100 requests per second to 1 million requests per second.