Olyv|Smartcoin interview Experience| Worst Experience | SDE 2| Bangalore|3 YOE

I had a truly frustrating interview experience with Olyv|Smartcoin for an SDE 2 position in Bangalore. It felt like a complete waste of my time. They required me to come into the office for the later rounds, only to effectively reject me much earlier due to what seemed like budget constraints and issues with my background. This felt very unprofessional.

My first round was conducted virtually and focused on Data Structures and Algorithms. The interviewer presented a problem: given an array representing building heights, along with a certain number of bricks (x) and ladders (y), I needed to determine the farthest building I could reach. The rules were: if the next building was lower or the same height, I could move for free; if it was higher, I had to use either a ladder or bricks equal to the height difference. I proposed two initial approaches—dynamic programming and binary search—and then refined my solution to an optimized greedy strategy. I received excellent feedback for this round.

The second round was in-person. I was asked to design a Low-Level Design (LLD) for a 'Book My Show'-like application, specifically focusing on how to save seat information and display a seat map within the app. They also inquired about my college projects. The interviewer was quite helpful, even suggesting useful hacks. I designed the full database schema, explained the necessary joins, and proposed using rectangle objects to represent seats along with other hall-related data. This round also went well, and I was told to proceed to the next stage.

However, before my third round began, a finance representative approached me and informed me about budget issues for the role. This revelation, coming so late in the process, was quite disheartening.

Despite this, I proceeded with the third round, which was also in-person. This round included behavioral questions about my short stints in previous companies and my salary expectations. Additionally, I was given a High-Level Design (HLD) problem: designing an email service capable of handling various types of emails (like OTPs and promotions) with rate limiting. The key requirement was to ensure OTP-related emails were sent immediately, while promotional emails were dispatched over time. My solution involved using a queue for promotional emails, Redis for rate limiting, and I discussed how to handle potential failures. While the interviewer seemed satisfied with my design, my past job switches and salary expectations were clearly a point of concern for them.

Ultimately, I was not selected, making the entire interview process feel like a significant waste of my time, especially considering the effort of traveling to their office.