My Interview Experience with Bright Money (Off-Campus, PPO 15 LPA)
Summary
I interviewed with Bright Money for an off-campus opportunity. The process included HR, two technical rounds (DSA and System Design), and a Hiring Manager round. I successfully cleared the initial rounds but was unfortunately rejected after the Hiring Manager round, missing out on the CTO round.
Full Experience
A few weeks back, I applied to Bright Money through LinkedIn for an off-campus opportunity. The process was intense yet insightful.
Round 1 – HR Discussion (Telephonic)
This was a short call where we discussed my background, résumé, and past work. I successfully cleared this round.
Round 2 – Technical (DSA, 1 hr)
In this round, I was given three problems and managed to solve two of them. The first problem was string-based, which I solved quite quickly in about 4 minutes using a permutation formula, achieving O(1) complexity. The second problem was a medium-to-hard challenge, quite layered in its complexity. It took me about 45 minutes, involving back-and-forth discussion with the interviewer. At one point, I recalled a concept from LeetCode 1685 (Sum of Absolute Differences in a Sorted Array), which was crucial in optimizing my approach and finally cracking it. It felt quite challenging to solve it fully on my own, but the communication with the interviewer significantly helped me reach the solution. I cleared this round.
Round 3 – System Design (Low + High Level, 1 hr)
I was asked to design a system using Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) concepts. I initially presented a design and later optimized it using a Max Heap / Priority Queue approach. This round also covered topics like threads, Django basics (based on my resume), and DBMS concepts. I successfully cleared this round.
Round 4 – Hiring Manager (Technical, 1 hr)
This round involved a discussion on my past projects and internship work. I was asked questions on Normalization (specifically BCNF) and some Django basics, drawing from my previous experience. There was also a Low-Level Design task, which I explained using Class Diagrams. Towards the end, I was asked for optimizations, but I could only explain the naive approach and struggled to articulate the optimal one. Unfortunately, I was rejected from this round and did not make it to the CTO round, which I was really looking forward to.
Interview Questions (1)
During one of my technical DSA rounds, I encountered a medium-to-hard problem that had around three layers of complexity to reach the optimal solution. While working through it, I recalled a crucial concept from LeetCode 1685 (Sum of Absolute Differences in a Sorted Array). Applying this concept helped me optimize my approach and ultimately solve the problem. The interviewer's guidance and my ability to connect it to known LeetCode patterns were instrumental.