DE Shaw | MTS | June-July 2024

My interview journey for the MTS role at DE Shaw began in June-July 2024.

The initial phase was an Online Assessment consisting of two LeetCode medium questions. I don't recall the exact problems, but I managed to complete the first one and passed most test cases for the second.

A month later, I was called for a Screening Round. This round heavily emphasized writing clean and structured code. I was tasked with designing a data structure for browser history with functionalities like adding/removing links, searching by keywords (where each link could have many), printing links in insertion order, and handling duplicate links. For instance, '/google/search' would have 'google' and 'search' as keywords. I proposed using a doubly linked list for links and a hashmap for keywords, with the hashmap's values being a list of links. The interviewer asked me to implement this approach, even if it wasn't the most optimal. We also discussed several Java concepts like Runnable vs Thread, Stream API, Deadlock, Notify vs Wait, concurrency, and OOPS principles.

A week later, I proceeded to the In House Interviews.

Round 1 (1 hour) was an intense Java grilling session. Almost every concept was touched upon, from basic program execution to concurrency, JRE vs JVM, Singleton design pattern, the volatile keyword, method hiding vs method overriding, and ThreadPoolExecutor. This discussion took about 40 minutes. For the remaining 20 minutes, I was given a coding question: Kth Smallest Number in Multiplication Table. I suggested all three common approaches: sorting, using a priority queue, and binary search.

Round 2 (1 hour) was a mix of resume-based questions and design problems. We discussed the Singleton Design Pattern again. I was then asked to design a Flight Booking System, with a particular focus on finding multiple-stop flight schedules. Other design questions included designing an LRU Cache and designing Java annotations.

After two weeks, HR scheduled a third Technical Round, but it was unfortunately rescheduled at the last moment. I still haven't heard back from HR regarding its rescheduling.