I applied online. The process took 3 months. I interviewed at Splunk (San Jose, CA) in Mar 2018
Interview
I applied online. Got a request for phone interview in about 2 weeks. I scheduled for a phone interview but the recruiting coordinator does not reply for two weeks and then says they have moved on to other candidates. The same recruiter contacts again asking for availability for a phone interview like nothing happened. I again give them dates and they again take their own time and they give me some other dates to which I agree immediately. The phone round is technical and the engineer conducted it quite well with enough patience and hints helping me in the right direction. After the phone round I don't hear back from them for about 4 weeks and I email asking about the status. They schedule the onsite two weeks later.
The onsite had 5 rounds. The first round is with a manager who kind of seem disinterested and showed no enthusiasm. He asked a bit about my background followed by question on C++, REST and asked me to write the algorithm to find intersection node between two linked lists. The next round was a lunch interview which was supposed to be for an hour and 15 mins. The interviewer just has a casual conversation about background and some of the projects I worked on. After lunch the conversation about the projects continued and I was asked to write the complete code to evaluate an infix expression containing *, +,-,/ and in between there were a lot of digressions which I did not like. The third round was with an engineer on video call. They started directly with a technical question. I was asked to code up a producer-consumer where each producer produces one item and consumer consumes one item. Only catch is the synchronization cannot use blocking primitives like semaphores or even condition variables (Lock free programming I guess). The way the engineer behaved was disrespectful and kind of made me uncomfortable. There were a bunch of other questions of which I did not answer most and this interview left a bad taste. I took a five min break before my next interview. The next interview was a data structure design question. It was a design question concerning trees. The interviewer was good and helpful and I did fairly well in this round. The last round was with the hiring manager which was basically overview of the product and answering some of the questions I had.
I finally received the offer two days after the interview.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Phone Interview:
External sorting algorithms. Various approaches to sorting data present on different machines.
Onsite:
Round1:
Default function generated in C++, some questions on copy constructor
What is Idempotency?
Difference between PUT and POST in REST. When to use one over the other
Find intersection node in linked list
Round2:
Evaluate an infix expression. Also had to identify the adapter design pattern to solve one of the issues with the code
Round3:
Producer-Consumer problem in a non-blocking way
Issues while transferring data between 32 bit and 64 bit machines
Some questions on resume projects
Round 4:
Design a tree which can contain any number of children. Implement create(parentid, childid) and find(nodeid). Constraints: No duplicate key, tree depth cannot exceed certain threshold d
Horrible. Rude. They were awful. Stay away. I never would recommend to even my worst enemy on this planet. What a terrible interviewer. Beware. They already picked someone. I am glad I dodged a bullet here.
I applied online. The process took 3 months. I interviewed at Splunk
Interview
The whole process took over three months and they even didn't provide the message after all stages that I am rejected. The time between rounds took form 3 to 4 weeks.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
DFS problem, leetcode medium in 1 round, leetcode easy in 2 round
- 30 minute call with HR
- 1h technical interview in Karat (data structures and algorithms + system design)
- 1-2h technical interview with team members
- 1h interview with manager
The whole process takes a lot of time but it is well organized.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Past experience in details - if I had any occasion to lead a project, how it went and how I overcame hardships.