Atlan | SDE winter intern | Remote | October 2024 [Rejected]
Summary
I interviewed for an SDE Winter Intern position at Atlan, which comprised four rounds: an Online Assessment, a Take-Home Assignment, a Technical Round, and a Cultural Round. Despite feeling confident after the cultural interview, I received a rejection email the following morning.
Full Experience
I applied for the Atlan winter internship on October 5, 2024. As an undergraduate from a Tier 3 college with 9 months of previous experience in a good startup and an open-source mentorship program, I was eager for this opportunity.
The interview process consisted of four distinct rounds. I received the Online Assessment test link on October 10th and completed it by the midnight deadline of October 11th. Following this, I got the Take Home assignment on October 12th, initially due on the 16th but extended to the 18th, which I submitted on time.
My Technical Round interview was held on October 24th. Within an hour, I received a positive email and a subsequent call to schedule the next interview, which boosted my confidence. The final stage was the Cultural Round on October 29th. Unfortunately, I received a rejection email the very next morning, despite believing the cultural round went well. My personal assessment is that I might have fumbled the 'Why Atlan?' question by focusing too much on my own exploration of tech domains rather than showing specific interest in their products and values.
Interview Questions (18)
The task is to implement an LRU (Least Recently Used) cache with a given capacity. The cache supports two operations: put to insert or update a key-value pair, and get to retrieve a value for a given key. If the cache exceeds its capacity, the least recently used element should be removed. The challenge requires both operations to have O(1) time complexity.
This problem involves selecting members from a group of 8 to maximize their pooled contributions. However, some members have conflicts (cold wars), meaning if one goes, the other cannot. The task is to find the maximum possible pooled amount by considering valid subsets of members without conflicting pairs.
The assignment involved developing a scalable logistics platform that links users and drivers for transporting goods, capable of handling 10,000 requests per second across 50 million users and 100,000 drivers globally. It features user access for booking and tracking, driver job management, and admin oversight of fleet and data. The system must efficiently manage real-time GPS data and vehicle matching. Deliverables included an operational application, architectural and ER diagrams, a system explanation document, and a video demonstration, focusing on scalability, performance, and functionality.
Find the sum of the digits of a given number.
I was asked several questions about the Go programming language, given my previous experience. These included 'Why do you like Go?', 'What are channels?', and 'What are goroutines?'
I was tasked with coding a solution in Golang to read a file line by line and, using Go concurrency, make calls to a processLines() function asynchronous. I initially struggled with the line-by-line reading functionality, but the interviewer prompted me to look up the 'bufio' package. After that, he simplified the concurrency aspect, which I then successfully implemented.
I was asked to provide a High-Level Design (HLD) for a checkout functionality within an e-commerce platform.
The interviewer questioned me about the CAP theorem, specifically asking which two characteristics from CAP should be prioritized in a payment service. Following this, I was asked about the concept of eventual consistency.
I was asked to introduce myself.
I was asked to talk about my previous internship experiences.
The interviewer asked me to describe the most impactful thing I had done to date and to share any failures I had encountered.
I was asked about my experience working in a remote setting during my previous internship.
I was asked for my thoughts on remote work, including the difficulties one might face and how to resolve them.
The interviewer presented a scenario: 'If an extremely tough task arrives at your desk, which you don't know how to approach, how will you go on with it given the deadline is near?'
I was asked about how I stay updated with the latest technological trends and my process for learning new technologies or programming languages. I also needed to cite something I learned recently and describe my approach.
I was asked a system design question: 'How will you scale a system for 10,000 users?'
The interviewer asked 'Why do you want to work at Atlan?'. I believe I may have mishandled this question by stating I was exploring various tech domains (like data, testing), instead of demonstrating a clear interest in Atlan's products and values.