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Target Interview Experience – Software Engineer Role (Location: Bangalore, Year: 2025)
Summary
I interviewed for a Software Engineer role at Target in Bangalore, consisting of four technical and managerial rounds. Despite a strong performance in most areas and a positive overall experience, I was ultimately rejected, learning the importance of thoroughly understanding every detail on my resume.
Full Experience
👨💻 Background
- College: Tier 2
- Graduation Year: 2023
- Experience: 2 years in software development
- Current Company: Société Générale
- Tech Stack: Java, Spring Boot, Microservices, SQL, Unix, etc.
📅 Interview Timeline
- Applied Via: Referral
- Response Time: 2 days
- Recruiter Call: Informed about face-to-face rounds at Manyata Tech Park (No Online Assessment)
- Total Rounds: 4
- Technical Round 1
- Technical Round 2
- Hiring Manager Round
- Technical Round 3 (Virtual)
🔍 Round 1: Technical Interview 1
- Format: Coding + Resume-based (Scenario-based)
- Duration: 1.5 hrs
- Interviewers: 2 (but one drove 95% of the round)
- Topics Covered:
- DSA: Tower of Hanoi, Kth largest from stream
- Microservices, REST API, Java, Spring Boot, React
- SQL: Two simple queries
- Java Stream API
- Difficulty: Moderate
- 📝 Thoughts: Answered most questions confidently. Positive start.
💡 Round 2: Low-Level Design
- Format: Whiteboard System Design + Resume discussion
- Duration: 1 hr
- Interviewer: Senior Engineer
- Topics:
- Design Uber-like Ride Booking Service
- Deep dive into current application at work
- Difficulty: Moderate
- 📝 Thoughts: Interview went well, felt like I impressed them.
💬 Round 3: Hiring Manager Interview
- Format: STAR-based managerial + tech conversation
- Duration: 20 mins
- Interviewers: 2 (One shadowing, one active HM)
- Topics Covered:
- Microservices, DBMS, Java, Spring Boot
- Behavioral:
- How do you stay motivated?
- What are you learning currently?
- Difficulty: Hard (Very in-depth, some unfamiliar concepts)
- 📝 Thoughts: Managed about 70–80% well. Room for improvement in depth.
💬 Round 4: Technical Interview (Virtual)
- Format: Coding + Scenario-based questions
- Duration: 1 hr
- Interviewer: Lead Engineer
- Topics Covered:
- DSA: Three Sum, Union of sorted arrays
- Java Streams, REST APIs, Multithreading
- Design an API: Fetch external data, check DB existence
- Debugging multithreading scenarios
- Difficulty: Moderate
- 📝 Thoughts: Strong performance, but stumbled discussing a feature built by a teammate that I included on my resume.
🎯 Offer & Reflections
- Outcome: Rejected
- Lesson Learned: Never list a resume feature you can't explain in-depth
- Final Thoughts:
- Extremely positive experience overall
- Interviewers and recruiter were genuinely respectful and supportive
- Left the process more confident and self-aware
Interview Questions (22)
Discussed or solved the Tower of Hanoi problem.
Problem related to finding the Kth largest element from a data stream.
Design a ride booking service similar to Uber, covering aspects like system architecture, database design, API endpoints, etc.
Behavioral questions: How do you stay motivated? What are you learning currently?
Problem related to finding triplets in an array that sum to a specific target.
Problem involving finding the union of elements from two sorted arrays.
Design an API that fetches data from an external source and checks for its existence in a database before processing.
Debugging exercises or questions related to common issues in multithreaded applications.
Explain the difference between database partitioning and sharding.
Discuss the disadvantages or drawbacks of using NoSQL databases.
Explain the purpose and usage of the @Valid annotation in Spring Boot applications.
Discuss key features introduced in Java 8 in detail (e.g., Lambdas, Stream API, Functional Interfaces).
Strategies and considerations for scaling an application from 100 to 1 million concurrent users.
Discuss the disadvantages or challenges associated with a microservices architecture.
Explain different strategies for handling transaction rollbacks in a microservices environment (e.g., Saga pattern, Two-Phase Commit).
Questions about the internal workings and implementation details of the Mockito testing framework.
Explain the differences and impact of using @Service versus @Controller annotations in Spring.
Explain the differences and use cases for @Bean versus @Component annotations in Spring.
Discuss concepts related to service discovery in distributed systems (e.g., Eureka, Consul, ZooKeeper).
Explain the Circuit Breaker pattern and its role in resilient distributed systems.
Discuss or implement common design patterns such as Decorator, Factory, and Proxy.
Explain different database normalization forms (1NF, 2NF, 3NF, BCNF) and their purposes.