Oracle SMTS Interview Experience

I recently had the opportunity to interview with Oracle for an SDE 2 position and was delighted to receive an offer. My interview journey spanned several rounds, each designed to evaluate different aspects of my technical prowess and behavioral aptitude.

Screening Round:

The initial screening round presented me with a LeetCode medium-level problem that required the use of a priority queue. This was followed by questions specifically targeting Java and Spring Boot frameworks.

Loop Interviews:

Round 1: Technical Round (1 hour)

This round was heavily focused on Data Structures and Algorithms. I encountered two DSA problems: one involved a hashmap, which was relatively easy, and another tree-based problem that bore a strong resemblance to LeetCode's "Binary Tree Maximum Path Sum". Additionally, the interviewer delved into JavaScript topics, specifically questioning my understanding of page rendering/loading optimizations and the event loop.

Round 2: Technical Round (~1 hour)

The second technical round featured a LeetCode medium-level graph problem. Further discussions ensued around Java/Spring Boot, and I was also asked to write SQL queries for two distinct problems.

Round 3: Behavioral Round (45 minutes)

This round was dedicated to assessing my behavioral skills. I was presented with various situation-based questions designed to understand my approach to teamwork, problem-solving, and conflict resolution.

Round 4: System Design Round (~1.5 hours)

The system design challenge was to "Design BookMyShow". The interviewer's primary interest was in my approach to handling concurrency. I was explicitly asked to focus on the concurrency aspects and to bypass the detailed design of services or APIs. We also discussed multithreading in depth, and there were questions related to the projects I had mentioned in my resume.

Ultimately, I was selected, and I'm very pleased with the outcome.