Oracle IC3
Summary
I recently interviewed for an IC3 Software Engineer role at Oracle and successfully received an offer. The interview process spanned several rounds, including technical screenings, deep dives into my projects, behavioral assessments, and a system design discussion.
Full Experience
My interview journey with Oracle began after receiving a call from a recruiter. I have about 5 years of experience, working as an SDE2 at a multi-national company. The recruiter informed me that the initial technical screening would be an elimination round, and passing it would lead to a full onsite loop of five additional rounds.
1st Round: Tech Screening
After initial introductions, the interviewer presented a dynamic programming question that was conceptually similar to the subset sum problem. It wasn't a direct copy, so I had to identify the underlying pattern to devise a solution. I managed to solve it completely, working through a few base case issues. Following that, a behavioral question was posed, and then we moved into system design, where I was asked to suggest improvements for a system the interviewer described.
Onsite Loop Interviews:
Round 1 (Technical)
The first question in this round was a warm-up, an easy LeetCode-level problem related to tree traversals. After that, another behavioral question was asked. The final technical question was to search in a rotated sorted array. I successfully solved both of these questions.
Round 2 (Hiring Manager)
I had anticipated this to be a system design round, but it turned out to be with a hiring manager. This round focused heavily on behavioral questions. We had an in-depth discussion about my past projects, my specific contributions, and various situational questions. I was also asked to draw out the system design for my current project and later suggest an improvement or change to a system.
Bar Tender Round (Senior Director)
This round, taken by a Senior Director, was a very pleasant experience. We had a good discussion about my work portfolio as detailed in my resume. Again, many behavioral questions were asked, and we discussed my current project and my contributions in detail.
System Design Round
After brief introductions and a few questions about my current project, I was tasked with designing a payment system at a high level. The interviewer also wanted to know what changes I would implement in the system to handle high traffic.
A few days later, the recruiter informed me that the debrief outcome was positive, and they would proceed with the offer rollout process.
Interview Questions (2)
Given a sorted array that has been rotated at some pivot unknown to you beforehand, search for a given target element. For example, [0,1,2,4,5,6,7] might become [4,5,6,7,0,1,2].
Design a high-level payment system. Discuss considerations for handling high traffic and ensuring scalability, reliability, and security.