Cloudera interview experience for SDE-1 On campus hiring 2022

I recently participated in the on-campus hiring drive for an SDE-1 position at Cloudera in 2022. The selection process was structured into four main steps.

Step 1: Resume-based Selection

The first stage involved a screening of resumes, which I successfully cleared to move to the next round.

Step 2: Coding Test (120 minutes on HackerRank)

This round consisted of four programming questions, where two were easy and two were of medium difficulty. All of them were standard problems:

1. Longest Increasing Subsequence
2. Word Compression
3. Last Remaining Element
4. A problem described as: "For strings and an integer k, a selection of substrings is valid if the following conditions are met: The length of every substring is greater than or equal to k. Each substring is a palindrome. No two substrings overlap. Determine the maximum number of valid substrings that can be formed from s."

I was able to solve three of these questions completely and achieved partial acceptance for the fourth one.

Step 3: Technical Interview 1

My first technical interview began with a standard introduction. The interviewer then presented two coding questions on their platform (codebunk):

1. Program 1: We discussed the theory of how a Binary Search Tree (BST) works, followed by a coding question to check if a given binary tree is a valid BST and how an optimal solution can be implemented. This is similar to LeetCode - Validate Binary Search Tree.
2. Program 2: This was an array-related question, essentially a Kadane's Algorithm problem focusing on its complexity, asking for the maximum subarray sum. This is similar to LeetCode - Maximum Subarray.

Following the coding problems, we moved to theoretical discussions:

• How memory allocation works in a program, specifically static and dynamic memory allocation.
• Deep dive into OOPS concepts, particularly the abstraction part.
• Differences in Java String declarations, with examples like String str = "abc"; and String str = new String("abc");.

Step 4: Technical Interview 2

This interview started with the usual "Tell me about yourself" question. Afterward, we covered several theory questions:

• Differences between Array and Linked List.
• DBMS – ACID properties, along with real-life examples.
• OS – Deadlock Condition, the difference between thread and process, semaphores, and Mutex.
• Networking – HTTP requests, DNS, how TCP works, and how various processes operate in a network, among other related questions.

Finally, there was a programming question:

Library System Design: I was asked to design a library system capable of storing a maximum of 50 songs. The requirements were:

1. If the library size is less than 50, simply add the song.
2. If the song already exists in the library, it should be removed from its current position and moved to the top (most recently played/added).

All insertion and deletion operations were required to be performed in O(1) time complexity. I decided to use a combination of a Queue and a Hashmap for my solution to meet these requirements effectively.