RateGain SDE-2 Interview Experience
Summary
My interview experience at RateGain for an SDE-2 role involved a mix of DSA, resume, and project discussions across three rounds. While the initial rounds were smooth, the final round was frustrating due to unexpected and irrelevant questions, leading to my application being put on hold.
Full Experience
Round 1 (DSA + Resume Deep Dive)
The first round primarily focused on Data Structures & Algorithms and an in-depth discussion of my resume. I was given two coding problems:
- Climbing Stairs: I tackled this by starting with a brute-force recursive solution and then progressively optimized it to the most efficient dynamic programming approach, completing it within 10 minutes.
- Min Stack: Similar to the first, I explained my thought process from a naive design to the optimal O(1) solution for all operations.
Following the coding, the interviewer delved deeply into my resume. I felt confident in my answers, and the interviewer seemed satisfied with both my problem-solving skills and the resume discussion.
Round 2 (Project + DSA)
This round was much more relaxed. The interviewer was very experienced and began by discussing my current projects and daily responsibilities in detail. Afterward, we moved on to DSA problems:
- A pattern printing problem, which I solved correctly.
- A Binary Tree problem, for which I explained my approach and pseudo-code due to time constraints. The interviewer seemed content with my explanation.
Overall, it was a good, interactive session.
Round 3 (In-Person, Resume + Problem Solving)
Unfortunately, the final in-person round was not a positive experience. It started with an extremely detailed resume grilling, which I managed fine. However, the interviewer then moved on to irrelevant and tricky code snippet output questions that felt disconnected from an SDE-2 role. I struggled with some of these.
Later, I was asked:
- A few problem-solving questions, which I answered correctly.
- To explain how HashMap works internally, which I answered partially.
- To implement a Trie data structure, which I did and explained thoroughly.
Despite my efforts, I had the impression that the interviewer was not satisfied with my performance in this round.
Overall Experience
Rounds 1 and 2 were fair, engaging, and well-structured. However, Round 3 significantly detracted from the overall experience. I had anticipated discussions on High-Level Design (HLD) or Low-Level Design (LLD) for an SDE-2 position, but instead, I encountered tricky, snippet-based questions that felt unproductive and left me with a negative impression. Subsequently, HR informed me that my application was put on hold for team discussions.
Interview Questions (4)
I was presented with the classic Climbing Stairs problem. The objective was to find the number of distinct ways to climb to the top of a staircase with n steps, where one can climb either 1 or 2 steps at a time.
I was asked to design and implement a stack that supports push, pop, top, and retrieving the minimum element in constant time, O(1). The problem required designing the data structure from scratch.
I was asked to explain the internal working mechanisms of a HashMap. This involved discussing concepts such as hashing, collision resolution strategies (e.g., separate chaining, open addressing), load factor, and how resizing operations are handled.
The task was to implement a Trie (also known as a prefix tree) data structure. This included implementing core operations such as insert a word into the Trie and search for a word or a prefix within the Trie.