Groupon | SDE3 | Banglore | December 2024 [Reject]

Hey everyone, I hope you're doing well!

I currently work as an SDE-2 at Amazon and recently had the opportunity to interview with Groupon for an SDE-3 backend role. The recruiter reached out to me on LinkedIn, and we had an initial call where we discussed my current roles and responsibilities, as well as the details of the position they were hiring for.

Round 1 (Data Structures & Algorithms)

This round had two questions:

1. Given a string of 0s and 1s, you can remove any non-palindromic subsequence in one operation. Return the minimum number of operations required to make the string empty.
2. Given the daily prices of a stock, maximize your profit by making as many buy-and-sell transactions as you want. There is a fixed fee for each sell transaction.

Verdict: Hire

Round 2 (High-Level Design)

In this round, I was asked to design a notification system, handling critical/non-critical notifications separately.

Verdict: Hire

Round 3 (Hiring Manager)

This round involved a mix of system design and behavioral questions:

1. Groupon has tie-ups with external vendors, but they cannot make real-time calls to check product availability. How would you design a system to handle this? The interviewer hinted at how platforms like BookMyShow handle ticket bookings. He also suggested that external vendors could expose a few APIs. I discussed periodic inventory synchronization and eventual consistency mechanisms. Looking back, I believe a soft booking system would have been a better approach, where stock is temporarily held before finalizing purchases to prevent overselling. Since I was interviewing after almost five years, I couldn’t immediately think in that direction.
2. How do you handle conflicts within/across teams?
3. How do you keep myself updated with the latest tech?

Verdict: No Hire

Overall Verdict: No Hire