Oracle | Associate Software Engineer | Bangalore | July 2022 [Offer]

I've been an active member of the LeetCode community for over three years, and I'm sharing my experience to give back. This interview was part of an on-campus selection at my college. I was a fresher, graduating in 2023, with a two-month FinTech internship. The process typically includes an aptitude test, an optional online coding round (which was skipped for on-campus), and three technical interview rounds.

My journey began with Round 1: Aptitude which lasted two hours. It covered a broad range of topics including logical reasoning, statistics, data analysis, CS fundamentals, and English. I remember struggling with some CS fundamental questions related to AVL and Red Black Trees. This test was conducted on Oracle's 'proaptitude' platform, with each section having timed subsections.

After clearing the aptitude test, I was invited to the interview rounds, all held on the same day.

Round 2: Technical Interview 1 (30-40 minutes) started with introductions. The interviewer quickly moved to a DSA question, which was very similar to Maximum Subarray Sum. After I finished, we discussed Computer Networks and Operating Systems concepts like Semaphores, Multithreading, and Multiprocessing. Since I had Python experience, I was also asked about the Global Interpreter Lock (GIL), Deep Copy, and Shallow Copy in Python. Another DSA question followed, similar to Diameter of Binary Tree. The interviewer seemed satisfied with my approach to these problems.

Round 3: Technical Interview 2 (30-40 minutes) also began with introductions. The interviewer asked about my C++ experience, but I honestly stated my primary experience was with Java, C, and Python. Surprisingly, he mentioned not knowing much about Java. He then questioned me on C fundamentals, including memory handling (Stacks and Heaps) and the differences between structs and unions. We then shifted to Computer Networks and Operating Systems, covering Piggybacking, TCP vs. UDP examples, IPC, and how pipes function. He also asked about my academic projects, specifically those built using C, and delved into topics like sockets and the SIGABRT signal. Finally, I was asked to write a SQL query to find the second largest salary from an employee table. Overall, this round was a bit challenging as I fumbled on some C fundamentals.

Round 4: Technical Interview 3 (30-40 minutes) was the highlight. The interviewer was very friendly and interactive. This round focused less on CS fundamentals or DSA and more on scenario-based questions to understand my thinking process. It started with a standard HR question: "Tell me about a time where you improved the performance of your project or anything that you were working on." I shared an experience from my internship, which he found satisfactory. He then inquired about my hands-on experience with cloud services like AWS or GCP. A significant part of the round involved a scenario about processing Big Data. He explained what Big Data entails and asked me to propose solutions, emphasizing that he was looking for my thought process. I suggested using Hadoop clusters and, for real-time data, Spark, which he was satisfied with. Given my resume, he also asked about MATLAB and Image Processing. Later, he questioned me about Java Spring and asked for a scenario where microservices would be beneficial. The final scenario involved improving the read and write performance of a database. I immediately thought of indexing and sharding. When he prompted for write improvements, I also mentioned caching, and he further explained its benefits in this context.

The interviews concluded, and I was offered an Internship + Full Time role by midnight.