Truemeds | SDE-2 Backend | Mumbai | Interview Experience

I saw a post on LinkedIn by a Lead Software Engineer of Truemeds hiring for backend engineers (SDE I/II/III/Lead) and shared my resume over email. I got an email after 8 days saying that my profile was shortlisted for interview rounds, and the first round would be taken by BarRaiser (third-party). The Truemeds HR called to schedule an interview the next day itself.

Round 1 - BarRaiser (1.5 hours)

The key focus areas mentioned were:

1. Database
2. Java Internals and Springboot
3. Coding and Problem Solving (Java)
4. DSA

The interview began with introductions, describing tech stacks and a high-level flow of the current project that I am working on. Then he moved to the focus areas.

Database

1. SQL vs NoSQL Schema difference.
2. What is Normalisation?
3. Role of Group By and Having Clause.
4. How does MongoDB handle large datasets?
5. Difference between LEFT JOIN and INNER JOIN.
6. A user table has the last login date as a column. Write a SQL query to find all the users who have been inactive for more than 90 days.

Java Internals and Springboot

1. Role of API Gateway in microservices.
2. Purpose of Container orchestration.
3. Explain an orchestrator service.
4. Concept of generics in Java.
5. What is a circuit breaker in microservices?
6. How to configure to integrate JPA in Spring Boot?
7. What are inner classes? Explain their types.
8. What is an anonymous class?
9. Difference between shallow copy and deep copy.
10. Purpose of @SpringBootApplication annotation.
11. @AutoConfiguration annotation.
12. What do Lombok annotations offer?
13. What are starters in Spring Boot?

Problem Solving/DSA (Java)

1. LC 283. Move Zeroes
2. Stack and Queue difference
3. GFG Implement Stack using Array

Although in the mail it was mentioned the interview was for 90 minutes, it was wrapped up in 70 minutes. I faced internet issues a couple of times, and thankfully it did not affect the interview. In the end, I asked for feedback, and he said to read more about distributed systems, and the rest was good. Overall, I felt the interview went positively. Although I read numerous posts on Leetcode beforehand about people's negative experiences with BarRaiser as a third-party interviewing company, I was fortunate to have a good experience. It probably depends on the interviewer to interviewer.

Round 2 - Technical Discussion (1 hour)

1. LC 11. Container With Most Water
2. Stream API - groupingBy
3. HashMap and LinkedHashMap
4. How to solve deadlock using threads in Java?
5. try/catch/finally block concepts
6. @Repository use in Spring Boot.
7. What happens if we replace @Repository with @Service in the DTO class?
8. Which is better between @Autowired and constructor injection?
9. To write some REST API endpoints.
10. How to insert and get data in Elasticsearch?
11. How to handle 1M users trying to hit an endpoint?
12. How does Redis work?
13. How to use pagination in Spring Boot?
14. How can we solve circular dependency in Spring Boot?
15. How can we see all logs of microservices in Spring Boot in a single place?
16. Explain @Transactional and @Profile annotation in Spring Boot.
17. SQL query involving GROUP BY and HAVING.

This round was average, according to me. Although I was able to solve all the coding problems, I was unable to provide the expected answers to some of the conceptual questions. Also, I had a hard time understanding the interviewer's accent.

After 1 week followed up with HR to know that they would not move ahead with my candidature.