JPMorgan Chase & Co. Software Developer Intern Interview Questions, Process, and Tips

Round duration - 65 minutes
Round difficulty - Medium

It was around 6 pm and was held on Hackerrank. Having switched on WebCam during the entire duration was mandatory. We were required to solve 2 questions under 65 mins. Solving one problem completely, along with some of the test cases of another, was enough for getting shortlisted.

Q1. Rearrange words in a sentence
You are given a sentence 'TEXT'. Each word of 'TEXT' is separated by a single space and the first letter of 'TEXT' is capital. You need to rearrange th...read more
Ans. 
Step 1 : Remove the capital letter (first letter of the sentence) and the full stop at the end.
Step 2 : I made use of the C++ STL library. I made a pair of strings and int where the string is the word and int is the position of the word in the sentence. These pairs were stored in a vector. I sorted the vector using the sort function of C++ STL and utilizing a custom comparison function to arrange the pairs according to...read more
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Q2.  Sudoku?
You have been given a 9 X 9 2D matrix 'MATRIX' with some cells filled with digits(1 - 9), and some empty cells (denoted by 0).
You need to find whether there exists a way to fill all the...read more
Ans. 
I followed the backtracking approach. This is a common problem.
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Round duration - 35 minutes
Round difficulty - Medium

The interview started with my brief introduction, and the interviewer then proceeded to ask some questions. I was asked to write a code for these two questions:
1. Find the distances between two given nodes of a binary tree.
2. Find the next greater number with the same set of digits.
After I was able to solve both questions, he proceeded to ask some questions about my projects. He seemed interested in the ML project and asked some basic questions regarding the same. We had a brief discussion on how Machine learning can be used in the Chemical Engineering field. He asked me why I was aspiring to become a software engineer despite having a Chemical engineering background. The round ended with me asking him about the types of projects interns are provided to work on at JPMC

Q1. Distance between two nodes of a Tree
Given a binary tree and the value of two nodes, find the distance between the given two nodes of the Binary Tree.
Distance between two nodes is defined as the minimum...read more
Ans. 
I used the Least common ancestors to do this question.
D(a,b) = D(a,LCA) + D(b,LCA) where
D(a,b) is the min distance between node a and node b.
LCA is the Least Common Ancestor is a common tree problem.
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Q2. Next Greater Number
You are given a string S which represents a number. You have to find the smallest number strictly greater than the given number which contains the same set of digits as of the original ...read more
Ans. 
My approach was to traverse the given number from rightmost digit, and keep traversing till I found a digit which is smaller than the previously traversed digit.
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Round duration - 20 minutes
Round difficulty - Easy

This round was comparatively short. It also started with my brief introduction. The interviewer then asked me about my area of interest, which was Data Structure and Algorithms. He asked me how to find the Nth node from the end in a linked list using a single traversal and LRU Cache implementation. He also seemed interested in the ML Project and asked to explain it in brief. He then gave me a situation wherein I had to make a model for a self-driving car. I gave him a basic idea of how the model will be trained, and he was satisfied. The round ended with him asking generic questions like 'Why JPMC?' , 'Why I chose to code despite belonging to the non-CSE background.'

Q1. Delete Kth node From End
You have been given a singly Linked List of 'N' nodes with integer data and an integer 'K'. Your task is to remove the Kth node from the end of the given Linked Lis...read more
Ans. 
I used the concept of two pointers. Make two pointers namely fast and slow. Move the fast pointer by n steps while keeping the slow pointer at the head. Now keep on incrementing both pointers till fast one reaches the end. The slow pointer is now at the nth Node from End.
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Q2. LRU Cache Implementation.
Design and implement a data structure for Least Recently Used (LRU) cache to support the fol...read more
Ans. 
This is a standard question from queues. I knew this beforehand so I answered the LRU cache Implementation can be done by using queue and hash map to store the pointer to element. Interviewer was satisfied.
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Round duration - 10 minutes
Round difficulty - Easy

It was late at night (around 12:30 am) but was crisp and short. HR was really friendly. I was called for the HR round on the same day as the other two rounds. HR asked me why I chose JPMC and why I aspire to become a software engineer. He then asked me about my skill set and how I will enhance it if I got selected. He then asked if I had any questions for him, where I asked him how the virtual working environment has been different from the office experience at JPMC, and if there were any significant challenges.

Q1. General Questions
Why I chose JPMC and why I aspire to become a software engineer?
How I will enhance my skill set if I was selected?
Ans. 
Tip 1 : Prepare some generic HR Questions in advance to give you an edge.
Tip 2 : Be confident about your answers and do not take too much time to think of an answer. 
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Round duration - 30 minutes
Round difficulty - Medium

Q1. Populating Next Right Pointers In Each Node
You have been given a complete binary tree of ‘N’ nodes. The nodes are numbered 1 to ‘N’.
You need to find the ‘next’ node that is immediately right in the lev...read more
Ans. BFS approach
The idea here is to Perform BFS while maintaining all nodes of the same level together, which can be done by storing nodes of the same level in a queue data structure, then for a particular level, we start popping nodes one by one and set the ‘next’ pointer of the previously popped node to the current node.
 
Example :
 
• Perform BFS  and maintain a queue for all nodes at the current level.
• Now, mo...read more
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Round duration - 10 Minutes
Round difficulty - Easy

Q1. Basic HR Questions
Are you willing to relocate?
What are your expectations?
Ans. 
Tip 1 : be true
Tip 2 : say yes
Tip 3 : easy round
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Round duration - 90 Minutes
Round difficulty - Easy

the test started at 4 in the evening. the test was conducted in the college only and all the questions were very basic .

Q1. Fastest Horse
There are ‘N’ horses running in ‘N’ different lanes numbered from 1 to ‘N’. You are given an array “FINISHTIME” containing ‘N’ integers where “FINISHTIME[i]” represents the time taken by the ...read more
Ans. Brute Force
For each query, we can simply loop between ‘L’ and ‘R’ and store the minimum time taken by a horse to complete the race in a variable, and return the value stored in that variable.
 
Algorithm for Each Query:
 
• Store the minimum time to complete the race in a variable ‘MINIMUMTIME’ and initialize it with a large enough number, in this case, 10^ 9 is sufficient.
• Iterate from ‘L’ to ‘R’ and if the time ta...read more
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Q2. Intersection of Linked List
You are given two Singly Linked List of integers, which are merging at some node of a third linked list.
Your task is to find the data of the node at which merging starts. If ...read more
Ans. Brute Force
• For each node in the first list, traverse the entire second list
• Check if any node in the second list coincides with the first list
  • If it does, return that node’s data
  • If it doesn’t, return -1
Space Complexity: O(1)Explanation:
O(1)
 
Since we only use constant space.
Time Complexity: O(m*n) - For 2d arraysExplanation:
O(N * M), where N and M are the lengths of the first and second linked lists respectively.&n...read more
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Round duration - 90 Minutes
Round difficulty - Medium

This was an online coding round where we had 2 questions of Medium to Hard level of difficulty to solve under 90 minutes. I was able to solve the 2nd question fully and the 1st one partially. 10 students were shortlisted for further rounds and I was one of them.

Q1. Longest Palindromic Substring
You are given a string (STR) of length N.
Your task is to find the longest palindromic substring. If there is more than one palindromic substring with the maximum length, re...read more
Ans. 
Approach :

1) Create a 2-D dp boolean vector(with all false initially) where dp[i][j] states whether s[i...j] is a palindrome or not and
initilialise a variable ans=1 which will store the final answer.

2) Base Case : For every i from 0 to n-1 fill dp[i][i]=1 ( as a single character is always a palindrome ) .

3) Now, run 2 loops first one from i=n-1 to i=0 (i.e., tarverse from the back of the string) and the second one from
...read more
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Q2. Count Subarrays with Given XOR
Given an array of integers ‘ARR’ and an integer ‘X’, you are supposed to find the number of subarrays of 'ARR' which have bitwise XOR of the elements equal to 'X&...read more
Ans. 
Approach (Using Hashing) :

1) Create a HashMap “prefXor” which stores the count of subarrays having a particular XOR value.

2) Create a variable “curXor” which stores the XOR for ‘i’ elements. Initialise it with zero. Also, create a
variable called “ans” to store the count of the subarrays having XOR ‘X’.

3) Start iterating through given array/list using a variable ‘i’ such that 0 <= ‘i’ < n

3.1) Update the “curXor” i...read more
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Round duration - 70 Minutes
Round difficulty - Medium

This was a preety intense round where I had to solve 3 algorithmic questions under 70 minutes. I first explained my approach for each of these questions and also discussed why they were optimal in the first place with their respective time and space compleixities. The interviewer was quite impressed at the end of the round.

Q1. Kth Largest Number
You will be given a stream of numbers, and you need to find the kth largest number in the stream at any given time.
As the stream of numbers can not be given during compile time, so yo...read more
Ans. 
Naive Solution:

Keep an array of size k. The idea is to keep the array sorted increasing order so that the k'th largest element can be
found in O(1) time.

How to process a new element of stream?

For every new element in stream, check if the new element is smaller than current k'th largest element. If yes, then
ignore it. If no, then remove the smallest element from array and insert new element in sorted order. Time complexi...read more
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Q2. Merge Two Sorted Linked Lists
You are given two sorted linked lists. You have to merge them to produce a combined sorted linked list. You need to return the head of the final linked list.
Note:
The give...read more
Ans. 
Approach :

1) Compare the head of both linked lists.

2) Find the smaller node among the two head nodes. The current element will be the smaller node among two head
nodes.

3) The rest elements of both lists will appear after that.

4) Now run a recursive function with parameters, the next node of the smaller element, and the other head.

5) The recursive function will return the next smaller element linked with rest of the sort...read more
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Q3. Stack using queue
Implement a Stack Data Structure specifically to store integer data using two Queues.
There should be two data members, both being Queues to store the data internally. You may use the i...read more
Ans. 
Approach : A stack can be implemented using two queues. Let stack to be implemented be ‘s’ and queues used to
implement be ‘q1’ and ‘q2’. Stack ‘s’ can be implemented in two ways :

Method 1 (push - O(1) , pop - O(n) ) :

1) push(s, x) operation :
i) Enqueue x to q1 (assuming size of q1 is unlimited).

2) pop(s) operation :
i) One by one dequeue everything except the last element from q1 and enqueue to q2.
ii) Dequeue the last i...read more
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Round duration - 30 Minutes
Round difficulty - Easy

This was a typical HR round with some standard Behavioral questions.

Q1. Basic HR Question
Tell me something about yourself?
Ans. 
Tip 1 : Prepare the points that you will speak in your introduction prior to the interview.
Tip 2 : Tell about your current cgpa, achievements and authenticated certification
Tip 3 : I told about my role in current internship and what all I do
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Q2. Basic HR Question
Do you know anything about the company ?
Ans. 
General Tip : Before an interview for any company , have a breif insight about the company , what it does , when was
it founded and so on . All these info can be easily acquired from the Company Website itself.
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