My Interview Journey at Motive (KeepTruckin)

My interview process for the Software Engineer role at Motive (KeepTruckin) began in June 2023. I went through a comprehensive series of seven rounds, each focusing on different aspects of my technical and professional capabilities.

Round 1 - Phone Screen (45 minutes)

This initial phone screen was dedicated to a deep dive into one of my past projects. I discussed its architecture, challenges I faced, and the solutions I implemented, along with my specific contributions.

Round 2 - Phone Screen (1 hour)

The second phone screen was a coding challenge where I was asked to solve a problem related to implementing a basic calculator.

Round 3 - System Design (1 hour)

This round focused on system design. I was tasked with designing an event booking system. I outlined the necessary APIs, user interaction flows, database design considerations, and explained my approach to handling concurrent seat bookings.

Round 4 - Integration Round (1 hour)

This was an interesting practical round involving API integration. I had to use the Nominatim API to find the postal address for a given latitude-longitude pair, then extend this to process a list of pairs from a CSV file. Finally, I used the OSRM API to calculate a route between two points.

Round 5 - Topgrading (1 hour)

The fifth round was a behavioral interview, following the topgrading methodology. I answered questions about my work experience, responsibilities in previous roles, how I rate my own performance, and my reasons for leaving past teams.

Round 6 - Coding (1 hour)

This coding round presented two problems: one on validating palindromes and another on determining if a string could be a permutation of a palindrome.

Round 7 - Coding (1 hour)

The final coding round involved two more string manipulation problems: checking for valid anagrams and finding all occurrences of anagrams of a pattern string within a larger text.

After completing all seven rounds, I unfortunately received a rejection.