Walmart SE-III Interview Experience | Questions & Experience | Rejected

SDE @ SAP Labs
1.7 YoE
Tier 3 college
FullStack Development, Angular & Java Springboot

Interview was for React + Kotlin SpringBoot Developer
Applied via Instahyre, Recruiter reached out was already in Notice period

Appeared 4 rounds (DSA + Java/React + HM + HR)

DSA Round

Interviewer was very friendly, took the time to establish good environment and make me very comfortable.

• Tell me about yourself, what work you've done, why did you do a masters
• Told will not ask any superficial DSA questions will only ask questions related to DSA we do in our day to day work to understand my approach and problem solving (proceeded to ask superficial DSA questions regardless)
• Q1) 55. Jump Game, told about the question in high level. was supposed to come up with a solution myself & establish test cases + edge cases myself. Solved it completely
• Q2) 22. Generate Parentheses, initial explaination of question was not enough. Had to ask lot of counter questions. Explained the approach and implemented it, had a small bug in recursive base case & was getting more results than expected (also got all the expected results). Due to less time remaining remaining interviewer told they understood my approach and maybe post interview I can have a look at the bug in my own time.
• Had a small discussion related to the job, day to day work & walmart post 2 DSA rounds.
• Feedback - Strong hire
• Tips for others, walmart mostly asks questions from previously repeated questions.

Java & React Round

The interviewer joined late & seemed not very interested in taking the interview, I disliked this round.

• Q1) Introduce yourself, what work have you done so far, tell me about the product you work at. [Worked at new product, still under development]
• Q2) Have you worked on java & react [Yes].
• Q3) Have you worked with authorization in your application, what are the authorization methods [told about JWT, Session, OAuth]
• Q4) How do you handle local & global Exception in your application, write code to catch such exception. [Talked about Controller throwing exception, Controller Advice, Exception Handler, Custom Exceptions]
• Q5) Follow up question on custom exceptions [RuntimeException vs Exception] how to always ensure that you always return a standard error code & message for an excpetion. like 123=User not authenticated exception. [Talked about creating custom exception with a property error code via inheritence like strategy pattern & using a hashmap to always map error codes to specific errors. Interviewer said yes this can be one correct way, another way springboot provides some context holder (ExceptionContext? i forgot name, please comment if you know) & springboot will always map an exception to its correct error code].
• Q6) Which cloud technologies have you used & services [aws services mentioned, lambda discussed, competitors like azure & BTP]
• Q7) what are the benfits of cloud
• Q8) How do you scale an application [vertical & horizontal discussion]
• Q9) If a service has 4 instances, how do you figure out which instance a request should go to [discussed about load balancing, layer 4 vs layer 7]
• Q10) load balancing algorithms you know [told 4-5 basic algorithms, didnt remember all due to anxiety, answer was in the back of my head]
• Q11) How do you scale a database [discussed about sharding, replication, partitions, read heavy / write heavy dbs]
• Q12) explain sharding, how is it different from application horizontal scaling
• Q13) Question about different environments in code, how do you manage different configurations [Spring @Profile, application-dev.properties etc]
• Q14) Which design patterns do you know [listed 8-9 design patterns, common ones like builder, strategy, Factory etc.]
• Q15) Follow up question you say you dont use singleton but you use springboot how is that possible? [told i dont use singleton much, what i meant was i don't write singleton classes myself. had to clarify that's because spring provides beans which are by default singleton but can be made proto, request etc.]
• Q16) Write code for builder pattern [told i usually do this via lombok, interviewer said assume you have all dependencies], wrote the code.
• Q17) Get call vs Put call, how do you do a get call [fetch/axios]
• Q18) Which hooks do you know in react [mentioned state, effect, context]
• Q19) write use state example with use case, [created a counter button]
• Q20) Do you know about UseContext, what does it do [talked about DOM reference, fumbled a little]
• Q21) State managements libraries you know, what are their purpose [redux & recoil]
• Q22) What are the components in redux [listed a few like actions, reducers, selectors. couldn't tell all. Was recently doing angular so told a little about ngrx & effects]
• Q23) How do you optimize frontend [talked about defer loading, lazy imports, lazy loading, pagination, bundling etc.]
• Q24) write pagination URL [GET /testPagination?skip=100&limit=10]
• Q25) what changes you need to do for pagination at frontend [cursor based / limit based in query params and keeping page state]
• Q26) changes for pagination in backend [send skip / limit to the database, partially filled page handling etc]
• Q27) what if user sends skip value very large like 1 million. how to handle [have a default max at backend, or return an error response page size requested too large]
• Interview done, asked if i had any questions & Discussed about technologies used at walmart
• Got feedback doing good, strong in java but weak in react.

HM Round

• Q1) What do you do in your team [E2E software development, development, design, test etc]
• Q2) Tell me about the product
• Q3) In which part of this product your work, what is your day to day responsibility
• Q4) Talked about agile model
• Q5) How many people in the team
• Q6) What is the general development process in your product i.e. from story to definition of done
• Q7) What if you miss the deadline in a sprint / spillover
• Q8) How do you manage spillover and communicate it with the team
• Q9) What is the design process of a backlog [architect usually does it]
• Q10) How do you manage new story coming for development from outside team [outside india]
• Q11) How do you take feedback, have you ever recieved negative feedback
• Q12) If you're starting a new product, how will you decide it's techstack. what parameters you will choose
• Q13) What is 3 most important things for you in a new team
• HM did give little hint that spillover not okay & best try to match the deadline. Also said US timezone calls i.e. late working hours
• Interview over, then she asked what questions I had, discussed about walmart work, about this new product under development
• Discussed about genai
• Feedback - no feedback to give, said you're doing good. keep doing what you're doing

HR Round

• How Are you doing
• How were the interviews
• feedback about interviewers
• By when can i join walmart, Since I was an immidiate candidate HR said they will fastforward the process
• discussed by when can i expect the OL
• discussed about the $$
• asked HR about walmart moving towards 5day WFO from end of year [hr said no, pretty sure she lied lol?]
• said will get back by the end of week with OL

next day i recieved a rejection email, asked for reason HR said debriefing result between interviewers and HM. they will not be proceeding with my candidacy (after giving HR round & discussing numbers lol)

pretty sure they found a cheaper candidate or some other reason.

Overall had a very bad interview experience with walmart (except first interview). I can see why people say it has become more like SBC and culture has become bad. there was no coordination bw HR and interviewers. sometimes they didnt had my resume, sometime my interview was scheduled instead of some other person.

I would think 3 times before joining walmart ever / giving their interviews again.