Flipkart SDE-2 Interview Questions, Process, and Tips

Round duration - 60 minutes
Round difficulty - Medium

It was a telephonic interview at 10 in the morning. Interviewer seemed cool.

Q1. Algorithm to find best insert position in sorted array
You are given a sorted array 'A' of length 'N' with distinct integers and a target integer 'M'. You need to return the positio...read more
Ans. Brute Force
• Iterate through the given array.
  • If at any position i, we get A[i] ≥ M, return i.
• If there is no such position i, return N.
Space Complexity: O(1)Explanation:
O(1).
 
As there is no extra space required.
Time Complexity: O(n)Explanation:
O(N), where ‘N’ is the length of the given array.
 
We are traversing the array only once. Hence, the overall complexity is O(N).
Answered by CodingNinjas
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Round duration - 60 minutes
Round difficulty - Medium

The interview was in the morning at 10 AM in the office meeting room.

Q1. Frontend and Backend Tasks
Given 2 arrays - frontend and backend tasks . each number in these array represents the complexity needed to run the task.There is a server that has to run these tasks., the serve...read more
Ans. 
Sort both arrays and start from one end of first and opposite end from second.and make pairs
I was trying to find the pairs as well as updating the max complexity needed but that approach was failing as it needed backtracking to correctly assign all the possible pairs.
The interviewer gave me a hint to solve it in parts-
First calculate the lowest complexity that the server can have(by using the same method mentioned abov
Answered by CodingNinjas
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Q2. House robber
Mr. X is a professional robber planning to rob houses along a street. Each house has a certain amount of money hidden. All houses along this street are arranged in a circle. That means the fir...read more
Ans. 
Didn't get enough time to code the solution but explained the approach
We can do this using DP
We can maintain 2 arrays - one represents the ans if we start from first house and the other represents the answer if we start. from the second house.Then simply looping over the array and calculating these array's elements.
Answered by CodingNinjas
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Round duration - 60 minutes
Round difficulty - Medium

The interview was at 11 AM in the meeting office.

Q1. Running median
You are given a stream of 'N' integers. For every 'i-th' integer added to the running list of integers, print the resulting median.
Print only the integer part of the media...read more
Ans. 
Started with the brute force solution of insertion sort
Interviewer asked to optimize.
Gave the solution which uses two heaps - max heap and min heap. the difference in size of both heaps cannot be more than 1. And we might need to remove elements from one heap to other heap as more input numbers are added
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Round duration - 60 minutes
Round difficulty - Medium

The interview was at 1 AM.

Q1. System Design
Was asked to design a notification service for website like Facebook.
Whenever someone liked our post or commented on our post
Ans. 
Tip 1: Asked a lot of questions to get clarity on the requirement
Tip 2: Keep in mind how to modularize the various components in the design
Tip 3: Mention the assumptions that you are taking
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Round duration - 60 minutes
Round difficulty - Easy

The meeting was at 2 PM in the office meeting room.

Q1. Resume and Past Experience Based Questions
There were a lot of questions, related to my resume, past experience, the technologies i had worked on. And then there were questions regarding the technologies an...read more
Ans. 
Tip 1: Be truthful. Don't try to fake things you don't know about.
 
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Round duration - 60 minutes
Round difficulty - Easy

10 AM

Q1. Project Discussion
Deeper discussion about all the projects i did in the past company.
Ans. 
Tip 1: Know well about the projects that you have done in the past

 
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Round duration - 1hour
Round difficulty - Hard

Q1. Snake and Ladder
You have been given a Snake and Ladder Board with 'N' rows and 'N' columns with the numbers written from 1 to (N*N) starting from the bottom left of the board, and alternat...read more
Ans. 
Just asked logic and asked to write code
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Round duration - 1hour
Round difficulty - Hard

Q1.  Stack using queue
Mvvm architecture
Ans. 
First described problem statement , described how I can achieve and then written test cases and started writing code as per test cases and completed but failed bcz of wrong output at final test case
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Round duration - 1hour
Round difficulty - Easy

Q1. Why want to join bigbasket , work experience
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Amazon Online assessment which consisted of 2 coding DSA medium question

Q1. Question related to TreeMap
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Q2. Question related BFS
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Q3. System Design - Design Feed system
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Round duration - 60 minutes
Round difficulty - Easy

Timing: evening
Environment: Online round took at home

Q1.  Smallest Subarray with K Distinct Elements
Given an array 'A' consisting of 'N' integers, find the smallest subarray of 'A' containing exactly 'K' distinct integers.
Note ...read more
Ans. 
At first sight this can be solved easily by using two loops to iterate over contiguous subarrays in O(n^2) and counting number of arrays and breaking the outer loop if number of odds exceed 'k'.

Optimised solution is to take two pointer approach where right pointer is incremented till num of odds not exceed 'k'. If limit is reached, increment left pointer and add number of arrays (right - left+1)*(right-left)/2 to the r
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Round duration - 90 minutes
Round difficulty - Medium

Machine coding round

Q1. Design and code publisher subscriber based messaging queue supporting following features:
Design and code publisher subscriber based messaging queue supporting following features:
1. New topic creation
2. Mul...read more
Ans. 
1. I drafted LLD by defining classes - methods and members.
2. I discussed the approach and working of LLD to fit the given features
3. I live coded the classes and logic using core Java on my machine.
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Round duration - 60 minutes
Round difficulty - Medium

Q1. Rat In a Maze All Paths
You are given a 'N' * 'N' maze with a rat placed at 'MAZE[0][0]'. Find and print all paths that rat can follow to reach its destination i.e. 'MAZE['N...read more
Ans. Backtracking Approach
Initialize, all the cells of the solution matrix used to print the path matrix to 0. First, you cannot make use of the existing maze to print the solution maze as you have to distinguish b/w 1 of maze or 1 of ‘SOLUTION matrix.
 
Form a recursive function, which will follow a path and check if the path reaches the destination or not. If the path does not reach the destination then backtrack and t...read more
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Round duration - 60-90 minutes
Round difficulty - Medium

Q1. Design stock exchange system
I was required to describe a typical stock exchange system design.
He asked me to begin with defining API contracts. Problem was open ended. Started with clarifying the scope and...read more
Ans. 
Tip 1 : Revise general distributed system concepts thoroughly.
Tip 2 : Practice as many design problems as possible with time constraints. Try to discuss approaches with friends.
Tip 3 : Clarify as many doubts and assumptions as possible wit h the interviewer before jumping to the solution.
Answered by CodingNinjas
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Round duration - 60 minutes
Round difficulty - Medium

Hiring Manager round

Q1. General Questions
1. Brief description of past work.
2. Recent challenging bug/issue solved.
3. Design description of one of the projects.
4. SDLC, tooling, agile related discussions.
Ans. 
Tip 1 : Revisit and recollect your past experiences in detail with a focus on learnings, challenges, conflicts etc.
Tip 2 : Prepare general behavioural and situational questions for the role.
Answered by CodingNinjas
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