Alation Software Engineer Interview Questions and Answers

Round: Test
Experience: Round 1: Online objective test.
There were questions from Operating Systems, C, Algorithms, Data Structures.

Round 2: Online and subjective (choose language C++ or JAVA). This round had 15 questions.
Data structures, C++ questions, Fibonacci optimisation, algorithms (DFS/BFS).

Round: Technical Interview
Experience: In the first round of interview they asked me questions about :1) My project (asked no. of classes and mention their responsibilities).
2) ACID properties of database and indexing in a database.

There were also questions related to OOPS concepts including polymorphism, composition, aggregation, inheritance, Abstract classes, interface; difference between usage of abstract class and interface, can abstract class be instantiated, how to access child class methods having reference of base class.
There was another question on run time and compile time binding and under which category do we classify method overloading and also questions on code for deleting the duplicate nodes in a sorted link list and printing root to leaf paths in a binary search tree.

Round: Technical Interview
Experience: This was the second round of the interview. They asked me the following questions,There is a tree (not binary) and all non-leaf nodes are RED in colour. Some leaf nodes are white in colour. If a node has all white coloured children then its colour can be changed into white. So we have to convert maximum number of nodes into white colour – write program for the same.
Code for checking whether a given binary tree balanced or not.
What are virtual functions, what is their role?
Questions related to virtual functions.

You are given the details of each transaction of each item i.e. item_name, quantity, price. So at the end of the day, you want top 50 items that have been sold. There are two cases:
In the first case you have fixed number of items.
In the second case very large number of items – so you need to decide what data structure to be used for this.

Round: Technical Interview
Experience: In the third round of the interview they asked questions like :
1) Types of tree traversals (breadth first and depth first (pre, post, in)
2) Determining width of binary tree i.e. using breadth wise traversal
3) Why files are preferred over databases?

College Name: IIT KANPUR