ServiceNow | SSE | Hyderabad | May 2024
Summary
I interviewed for a Senior Software Engineer position at ServiceNow, successfully clearing four rounds of interviews. Despite receiving positive feedback throughout the process, I was ultimately rejected with a generic email.
Full Experience
My journey began with an introductory call from a recruiter who discussed my background, previous experience, the role's details, and compensation expectations. After confirming alignment, they informed me that another HR representative would assist with scheduling.
Approximately 10 days later, my first technical round was scheduled:
Problem Solving Round
This round focused heavily on problem-solving skills and the rationale behind choosing specific algorithms. The interviewer was less interested in perfectly working code and more in my thought process and a draft solution. I was presented with two coding challenges and one behavioral question:
Miscellaneous Round with Staff Engineer
Immediately after clearing the first round, HR contacted me to schedule the next round, which happened two days later. This round with a Staff Engineer touched upon a wide range of topics, with the interviewer emphasizing that he was evaluating my problem-solving approach rather than just the final solution. We discussed a coding problem, its extensions, and several system design and conceptual questions:
Miscellaneous Round with EM
After a week, HR informed me I had cleared the Staff Engineer round and scheduled the next round for the very next day. This round was with an Engineering Manager (not the hiring manager) and focused on my previous work experience, a deep dive into one of my past projects, and some Object-Oriented Programming (OOPs) concepts.
Techno-Behavioral Round with HM
Two days later, HR called again to confirm I had cleared all three technical rounds, and the final round with the Hiring Manager was scheduled for the following day. This round involved extensive discussions about my previous work, expectations from the company and the role, and ensuring mutual alignment. I was also asked a system design question:
All my rounds proceeded well, and I consistently received positive feedback. However, despite this, I eventually received a generic rejection email, which felt similar to a rejection during the resume screening phase. I've observed this pattern with other candidates too, which I believe is an inefficient use of time and resources for both candidates and the company, potentially impacting the company's reputation.
Interview Questions (11)
Given a string s consisting of only open and closed parentheses '(', ')', evaluate its score based on the following rules:
()has a score of 1.ABhas a score ofA + B, where A and B are balanced parentheses strings.(A)has a score of2 * A, where A is a balanced parentheses string.
Describe a time when you engaged in 'anti-engineering' practices and explain your rationale for doing so.
Given an array where all elements appear twice and are placed next to each other, except for one single element which is not repeated. Find that unique element. Example: [1,1,2,2,4,4,5,6,6] output 5.
What is fault tolerance?
What is a transaction?
Explain transactions in a distributed system context.
Describe how a payment service and an order service can communicate and update their respective values during the process of an order creation.
Perform a Low-Level Design (LLD) for a Cab Booking system, specifically focusing on implementing the pricing mechanism with simple assumptions.
What are the best practices for creating a new REST API?
Design a data model for the Aarogya Setu application.