Salesforce SMTS Interview Experience — AUG 2026

Company: Salesforce Role: Senior Member of Technical Staff (SMTS) Experience: ~5 YOE Location: India Process: OA + Technical Round + In-person Drive Overall process: 4 rounds after the OA / initial technical screening, with the final in-person drive consisting of DSA, Design and HM rounds.

Online Assessment / Initial Technical Round The initial technical round was 60 minutes and consisted of DSA Coding Question 1 - Minimum Window Given a string consisting of n words and an array of k required words, return the minimum contiguous sequence of words containing all the required words. The matching condition was all-or-none:

• If all required words are present -> return the minimum window.
• If even one required word is missing -> return an empty string. This required identifying a sliding-window pattern.

Coding Question 2 - Permutations Given a word containing unique characters, return a list containing all possible permutations of those characters. This was a straightforward backtracking problem.

In-Person Drive

The in-person drive consisted of three elimination rounds:

1. DSA
2. Design
3. Hiring Manager

Round 1 - DSA + Behavioral DSA Question 1 - Ball Collision Given a sequence of incoming balls, where each ball has:

• direction: +1 or -1
• strength Two balls collide when:
• one is moving right (+1) and the other is moving left (-1) When they collide:
• the ball with greater strength survives
• if both have the same strength, both are destroyed Return the indexes of the balls that remain after all possible collisions. This was essentially a stack/simulation problem, but the problem was presented as a real-world scenario rather than explicitly identifying the pattern.

DSA Question 2 - Peaks / Climbing Kit / Helicopter Given an array representing the heights of consecutive peaks, determine the maximum-indexed peak that can be reached. To move from peak i to i+1:

• If the next peak is higher, the positive height difference requires climbing-kit resources.
• If the next peak is lower or equal, there is no climbing cost.
• A helicopter can be used subject to a given limit and can cover an arbitrary height difference. The objective was to determine the furthest peak reachable under the available resources. This was an optimization/resource-allocation problem requiring identification of the appropriate algorithmic approach.

Behavioral Questions Two behavioral questions were also asked during the DSA round. One focused on: How do you decide between the trade-offs of two different approaches for a project? The emphasis was on engineering judgment and explaining how I evaluate competing technical approaches.

Round 2 - LLD / Design Elevator System Design an elevator system. The discussion covered:

• identifying the major objects/classes
• responsibilities of the objects
• elevator state
• handling elevator requests
• assigning an elevator to a request
• the algorithm for selecting an elevator
• minimizing customer wait time The interviewer went beyond simply designing the classes and discussed the algorithm used by the elevator controller/scheduler to decide which elevator should service a request. So the round was a combination of: LLD + object modelling + scheduling/algorithmic reasoning.

Round 3 - Hiring Manager The HM round focused heavily on my current project and actual contribution. Topics discussed included: Current Work

• Current project
• My specific contribution
• Problems I worked on
• Technical ownership Architecture
• Current system architecture
• Why the architecture was designed that way
• Technical decisions
• Trade-offs
• Defending the architecture
• What I would do differently if I were redesigning it Leadership / Behavioral
• How I deal with conflict
• Demonstrating leadership
• Mentoring others
• Strengths
• Weaknesses The HM discussion was fairly deep and focused more on ownership, technical judgment and leadership than on generic behavioral questions.