ServiceNow USA Staff Offer

I recently interviewed for a Staff Software Engineer role at ServiceNow. The process started with a Hiring Manager Screen, which lasted about 60 minutes. This round included some behavioral questions, discussions about my work experience, my role, and the impact I've made. I was also asked to solve 2-3 coding questions which were quite straightforward. I had to implement a linked list and add several APIs to support use cases such as removing all duplicates and reversing a sublist given start and end indices.

The onsite interviews consisted of multiple rounds:

• Coding Round 1: I faced 1-2 behavioral questions. The main coding problem was a stock question with follow-ups: Given a list of stock prices, I needed to find the maximum profit if at most 2 transactions were allowed. The interviewer wanted a recursive solution first, followed by an optimized version. The follow-up extended this to allow max 'k' transactions. This is a standard DP problem, and I explained a memoization approach using a HashMap as a cache instead of a 2D table.
• Coding Round 2: Again, there were 1-2 behavioral questions. The coding challenge involved a company hierarchy represented as a binary tree, where I had to find the most relevant common department, which translates to finding the Lowest Common Ancestor. We then discussed what if the tree was an n-ary tree and talked about various optimization techniques.
• System Design Round: This round started with 2 behavioral questions. The system design problem prompt was displayed on a whiteboarding tool. It described a complex system involving uploading, supporting multiple GET endpoints, and orchestration aspects. We delved into design choices, tradeoffs, scalability, and monitoring. A significant portion of the discussion revolved around security aspects and access controls. I noted that I didn't have deep expertise in security-related conversations, and the interviewer probed to gauge my understanding in this area, as the team was particularly focused on security.

A week after my interviews, the hiring manager reached out, informing me that the feedback was positive and there was no need for an additional hiring manager round. They extended an offer. I must say, the hiring manager was one of the nicest people I've met throughout this process, and I thoroughly enjoyed my conversations with all the interviewers. There was a slight hiccup in one of the coding interviews related to language, which I mentioned to the hiring manager, anticipating it might affect the outcome, but it didn't.