Motive | Interview Experience | Rejected at HLD

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motive
· SDE 2· Remote/India· Rejected
December 18, 2025 · 121 reads

Summary

Interviewed at Motive for SDE 2 role. Cleared all rounds except the final HLD round which led to rejection. Focused on DSA, machine coding, and system design.

Full Experience

Interviewed at Motive for SDE 2 role. The process started with a hiring manager round, which focused on my background and technical depth. Then, I moved to the technical/DSA round where I solved two LeetCode problems. The third round was another technical/DSA round with two more problems. The fourth round was a machine coding task where I designed an API for deprecated cars. Finally, the fifth round was a High Level Design (HLD) round where I designed TikTok, which was the bottleneck leading to rejection.

Interview Questions (5)

1.

Group Anagrams

Data Structures & Algorithms·Medium

Solved using a Hashmap with sorted strings as keys.

2.

Search a 2D Matrix II

Data Structures & Algorithms·Medium

Efficiently searching a row-wise and column-wise sorted matrix ($O(m + n)$ approach).

3.

Contiguous Array

Data Structures & Algorithms·Medium

Finding the maximum length of a contiguous subarray with an equal number of 0s and 1s (Prefix Sum + Hashmap).

4.

Palindrome Permutation II

Data Structures & Algorithms·Hard

Generate all palindromic permutations of a string. Used a frequency map and backtracking.

5.

Minimum Swaps to Group All 1's Together II

Data Structures & Algorithms·Hard

Focused on the sliding window approach for a circular array.

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