I applied through a recruiter. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Salesforce (San Francisco, CA) in Mar 2012
Interview
I was contacted by a recruiter about this opportunity. After a week i have received
the schedule for phone interview. The interview was with the hiring manager. The questions were related to my current and previous projects, I explained in detail. Then few questions about basic java stuff (oops concepts). Then few questions about performance and memory leaks. The interviewer was very nice and helpful through the interview. He was very happy by the end of the interview and invited me for the onsite interview. Onsite interview was a java coding test and it was in san francisco. After few days of onsite coding test I have heard from the recruiter that they are not moving with my application to the next stage. Overall very positive experience and learned a lot.
Interview questions [2]
Question 1
Find the first index of the substring.
Condition:
Do not use java library function or regular expressions.
And measure the performance of your implementation with the standard java library function.
Examples:
String 1: “abcdefg”
String 2: “bcd”
Should return 1
String 1: “abcdefg”
String 2: “x”
Should return -1
The technical interview was much tougher than I anticipated. I faced a DSA question related to word searches that required optimizing a brute-force approach with a Trie. It was intense, but the practice I’d done on PracHub the week before really helped solidify my understanding of the problem-solving techniques. The behavioral round felt lighter, focusing on teamwork and project experience. After a couple of days, I received an offer, which I happily accepted. Overall, it was a challenging yet rewarding experience.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Word Search II - given an m x n board of characters and a list of words, return all words that can be formed from sequentially adjacent cells; had to optimize the brute-force backtracking with a Trie to pass the time limit
The interview process started with an online coding assessment that included DSA and problem-solving questions. After clearing the test, I had two technical interview rounds focused on data structures, OOPs concepts, DBMS, and project discussion. The final round was with the hiring manager where they asked about teamwork, problem solving, and career goals. The interviewers were professional and the process was smooth overall.
Went through 3 rounds. First round was a technical interview - it was a take home assessment. I didn't pass the test cases but still went through to the next round. The onsite had 1 behavioral, 1 system design, and 1 technical Leetcode style interview. It was in person on a whiteboard.