Urban Company | SDE-1 | Interview experience
Summary
I interviewed for an SDE-1 role at Urban Company in Bangalore, comprising two rounds focusing on Data Structures & Algorithms and Low-Level Design. I received positive feedback, but the position was ultimately put on freeze.
Full Experience
Reached out to recruiter over linkedin
Total rounds: 2
Round 1 – DSA
Total time: 1h
- DSA 1: Agressive Cows
- Started with brute force.
- Optimised using Binary on range.
- DSA 2: Sliding Window
- Was LC med, standard solution using 2 pointer sliding window and hashmap.
- I was not able to come up with the standard approach instead solved using 2 pointers and range query.
- Came up with some edge cases by myself and how to handle them.
- Became really really complex but solved in the same time complexity.
Interviewer was really impressed with the approach and me finding and handling the edge cases without hints.
Round 2 – LLD (Class & DB Design)
Total time: 1h15m
- Initial Discussion (~10m) – Previous Work
- Interviewer had worked on something similar.
- Talked about scaling challenges and tradeoffs with other competitive algorithms.
- Felt more like a peer discussion than Q&A.
- LLD: Membership System
- Class design
- DB schema design
- Entity relationships
- Indexing considerations
- Membership tiers
- Subscription lifecycle
- Renewals / upgrades
- Handling expiry scenarios
Got a positive feedback from HR and was told, I'll be moving forward to managerial round but 2 days later got news that position was put to freeze.
Overall experience was really great.
Interview Questions (3)
Aggressive Cows
The problem involved finding an optimal solution, initially approached with brute force and then optimized using binary search on the range.
Sliding Window Problem
A LeetCode medium problem requiring a standard 2-pointer sliding window approach, potentially involving a hashmap. I solved it using 2 pointers and a range query, handling edge cases without hints, resulting in a complex but time-optimized solution.
Membership System Design
Design a membership system, covering aspects such as class design, database schema design, entity relationships, indexing considerations, membership tiers, subscription lifecycle, renewals/upgrades, and handling expiry scenarios.