Park+ SDE interview Experience

I initially applied for an SDE2 role at Park+ through a Google Doc shared by their recruiter on LinkedIn. The recruiter reached out and suggested I interview for an SDE1 position, which I accepted. My resume highlighted Java, Spring, and DBMS, and I have 2 years of experience.

My interview process consisted of four distinct rounds:

Round 1 (May 18, 2024)

This round was conducted by a third-party hiring agency named Jobtwin and lasted about 50 minutes out of the scheduled hour. It began with an introduction, followed by questions on my current project's architecture, object-oriented programming concepts like multiple/multilevel inheritance, function overloading/overriding, and output prediction for related code examples. Database questions included primary/composite keys and different types of joins. I was also asked about exception handling in Java and the possibility of creating custom exceptions. The DSA question was Decode String. Finally, we discussed the importance of unit test cases. I received a call from the Park+ recruiter within 2-3 hours, informing me that I had cleared this round and that the second round would be scheduled for Monday.

Round 2

This 1-hour round focused heavily on DSA and CS fundamentals. I was given two DSA questions: one to partition a string into parts with no common characters (e.g., 'ababcbacadefegdehijhklij' -> 3 parts) and another to find the size of the largest BST within a given binary tree. I also had to write an SQL query to find department-wise total salary in ascending order. CS fundamental questions covered the differences between HTTP and HTTPS, the detailed process of typing a URL and hitting enter in a browser, mutex vs. semaphore, and database indexing types. The next day, I received a call to schedule the third round.

Round 3 (May 23, 2024)

This 1-hour round started with an introduction and an explanation of Park+'s tech stacks and products. I was then asked to complete an on-screen test with two SQL queries, each to be solved in 7 minutes: one update query and one select query using UNION. The system design challenge was to design a parking management system for malls and buildings. We also discussed the concepts of stateful and stateless systems. The recruiter called the next day to schedule the final round with the DOE.

Round 4 (May 27, 2024)

The final round was also 1 hour. It began with an introduction, followed by an SQL query to find the employee with the maximum salary in each department from an Employee table. The coding question involved merging two sorted arrays in-place such that the first array holds the N smallest elements and the second array holds the remaining M elements. Further questions covered operating system concepts like deadlock, paging, page miss, Round Robin, FIFO, and starvation, along with networking (sockets) and database normalization. The interview concluded with a classic puzzle about transporting mangoes by a horse over a distance.

Unfortunately, after this final round, I received no response from the recruiter, indicating that I was rejected.