Track: SDE-1 / New Grad

SDE-1 / New Grad - UrbanClap Interview Briefing

Overview

The SDE-1 / New Grad hiring process at UrbanClap consists of 4-5 elimination rounds, including an online coding assessment, system design, technical whiteboarding, and managerial/HR rounds. The process is designed to evaluate both technical skills and cultural alignment, with a strong focus on problem-solving and practical implementation.

Round Breakdown

1. Online Assessment (OA)

• Format: Conducted online with internet access. Candidates have 60-70 minutes to solve and email their responses.
• Questions: Three coding questions (exact questions not specified).
• Source: LeetCode Discussion

2. System Design Round

• Duration: 45 minutes
• Focus: Designing a system for a card game with M players. Candidates are expected to use OOP concepts to design the game where the player with the highest score wins (score = sum of numbers on cards possessed by the player).
• Source: LeetCode Discussion

3. Technical Whiteboarding Round

• Duration: 60 minutes
• Questions Asked:
  1. Find the intersection of two linked lists.
  2. Identify two repeating numbers in an array of n+2 elements where elements range from 1 to n.
  3. Solve the minimum add-to-make-parentheses-valid problem.
• Source: LeetCode Discussion

4. Managerial / HR Round

• Focus: Conversation with the VP of the company. Assesses culture fit, resume grilling, and problem-solving through puzzles.
• Questions Asked:
  1. Solve the pizza puzzle.
  2. Solve the gold-for-7-days-of-work puzzle.
• Source: LeetCode Discussion

Alternative Process for Android Role

1. Technical Phone Screen

• Duration: 1 hour
• Platform: Google Hangout
• Focus: Android and Java fundamentals, including threading, concurrency, lifecycle management, and memory optimization.
• Practical Task: Build an Android app using the Zomato search API with features like infinite RecyclerView, filtering, and search functionality.
• Questions Asked:
  1. Working of Handler and Looper in Android, differences between Android threads and Java threads, and explanation of Handler threads.
  2. Concurrency frameworks in Android and their use cases.
  3. Problems with AsyncTask, lifecycle relationship between AsyncTask and Activity, and potential issues.
  4. Working of different methods of RecyclerView.
  5. When to register/unregister Broadcast Receivers in an activity and advantages of using onStart()/onStop() and onResume()/onPause() over onCreate()/onDestroy().
  6. Differences between ListView and RecyclerView.
  7. Calculation of how many times onCreateViewHolder would be called given 50 items and maximum visible rows.
  8. Methods to communicate between two fragments.
  9. Weak references vs. strong references with examples.
  10. Causes of memory leaks in Android applications.
  11. Purpose and usage of SparseArray.
  12. Differences between Serializable and Parcelable, and which is preferred in Android and why.
• Source: LeetCode Discussion

2. Technical Interview-I (DS Algo Round)

• Duration: Conducted on Hangouts
• Focus: Discussion about the candidate's projects and internships, conceptual questions on push and pull mechanisms, followed by two coding problems.
• Questions Asked:
  1. Use cases of push and pull mechanisms.
  2. Finding the starting element in a sorted and rotated array.
  3. Implementing a deep copy of a graph (cloning a graph).
• Source: LeetCode Discussion

3. Technical Interview-II (VP Round)

• Duration: Conducted on Hangouts
• Focus: In-depth discussion about the candidate's background, motivation for Android development, and project discussions.
• Questions Asked:
  1. Describing the architecture of the candidate's last app.
  2. Writing a program to check if a string is a palindrome without using extra space, including time complexity analysis.
  3. Explanation of string interning.
  4. Writing a program for substring search.
  5. Providing views and suggestions on the UrbanClap Android app.
• Source: LeetCode Discussion