About the company: 

CarWale is India’s largest auto media vehicle. CarWale serves car buyers and owners in the most comprehensive and convenient way possible. They provide a platform where car buyers and owners can research, buy, sell and come together to discuss and talk about their cars.

Brief job profile: 

• Company Name: Carwale
• Type of company: E-commerce
• Role offered : Associate Software Development Engineer (SDE1)
• CTC offered: 7.5 LPA 
• Service bond: No bond applicable
• Job Description: As a software developer, you will be the brain behind crafting, developing, testing, going live, and maintaining the system. You are passionate about understanding the business context for features built to drive better customer experience and adoption. 
• Eligibility : 6 & above CGPA . No Active Backlog
• Branches eligible to apply: COMP/IT/ETRX/EXTC

Context for getting started with placement process: 

The recruitment process was pretty smooth. The interviewers were quite friendly. The students who clear the online round are called for Technical Interview. To clear technical rounds, you should be very well prepared with DSA(Data structures and Algorithms) and system design problems. Students will be expected to write codes in the interview. They also ask questions from your resume. You may be asked puzzles as well. Now, let's dive into the details of each round.

Round 1 (Coding test):

About 220 students appeared for this round. It was an online coding test conducted on HackerRank. We were given 4 coding questions which were random for all. The difficulty was moderate, try to give the most optimistic approach to pass all test cases.

Some of the questions that I got are as follows: 

1. Easy array problem which involved sorting, finding the absolute difference, and then taking the sum of it 
2. https://leetcode.com/problems/minimum-difficulty-of-a-job-schedule/description/
3. https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/maximum-of-minimum-difference-of-all-pairs-from-subsequences-of-given-size/
4. https://leetcode.com/problems/maximum-profit-in-job-scheduling/

I was able to solve 3 problems fully. Most of the students who had completed 1 problem fully and 1 partially were shortlisted for further rounds.

• Platform:  HackerRank (https://www.hackerrank.com/)
• Duration: 2 hours
• No. of Questions: 4
• Difficulty levels: 2 Low,2 Medium 
• Programming language: Any ( E.g C, C++, JAVA, R, GoLang Except Python)

Round 2: Technical Round 1

Around 50 students were shortlisted for this round. This was a technical interview round conducted on Google Meet. This round went for around 1 hr. The interviewer introduced herself and informed me that she will be testing my DSA knowledge. Initially, the interviewer asked the following questions:

• Tell me about yourself
• One project you want to talk about
• How do you rate yourself in Data Structures on a scale of 1 – 10?

Follow-up questions were related to my internship experiences mentioned in the resume, the project I spoke about, and the reason to give a specific rating in Data structures. Then she asked me 2 coding questions :

1. https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/check-for-balanced-parentheses-in-an-expression/
2. https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/sort-stack-using-temporary-stack/
3. Additional question was to optimize the above question using multiple stacks 

In all three questions, the interviewer asked me to code on an online editor link sent by her followed by explaining each line of the code. Then I was asked to dry run the code with sample input given by the interviewer followed by space and time complexity. In the end, I was asked to give a solution to a simple puzzle (https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/puzzle-3-cuts-cut-round-cake-8-equal-pieces/)

She gave me some time to think and then I was able to give the optimistic approach and answer all questions expected by the interviewer. Approach to the problem matters the most so keep explaining what you are thinking and trying to do while typing the code and be confident. Then I asked her some questions when given a chance.

• Platform: Google Meet 
• Duration: 1hr 
• No. of Questions: 3 
• Difficulty levels: Medium

Round 3: Technical Round 2

I got a meet invite for round 2 after an hour of R1. This round was purely based on system design. Even this went for around an hour. The interview began with my self-introduction. Then I was asked to design a medium clone. There were four sections expected to be talked about in detail while designing a medium clone which was as follows:

1. Features/Use cases
2. Infrastructure
3. Database schema
4. scalability 

I started with the basics first like listing various functionalities, system architecture, tables of the database schema. Make sure you keep interacting with the interviewer by asking questions related to the design of the app, such as how many users should the app be able to handle, the average no. of posts by a single user per day, etc.Then some of the questions asked by the interviewer were as follows:

• How to handle the heavy load on the server?
• How to increase database performance?
• What if two users are accessing the same post and they like the post at the same time?

The interviewer was quite helpful. He was giving me hints wherever I got stuck. All I want to suggest is don’t go to the best solution at first, start with brute force and keep optimizing your solution.

You can find the answer to such questions in the link provided below:

https://leetcode.com/discuss/interview-question/system-design/719253/design-facebook-system-design-interview

• Platform: Google Meet
• Duration:1hr 
• No. of Questions: 10-12 
• Difficulty level: High

Round 4: HR Round

I got a meet invite within 10 minutes of my round 2 . Interviewer was very friendly. First, he asked me to rate my performance in previous rounds as well as the reason to give that rating. Then he asked me to tell him pretty much everything from childhood to date. He asked me what my friends will tell him about me if he asks them and what I think about them. Then he asked me about my hobbies and what I do in my free time. Then he gave me some situations:

• If you could go back 5 years, what would you tell your past self?
• How will you describe yourself in 3 words?
• What success means to you?
• Where do you see yourself in 5 years?

And many such situations. All I want to suggest is to be yourself and give positive answers. In the end, he told me that I was the first person to get shortlisted for the HR round from our college that quickly. Those words from the interviewer made my day. Then He asked if I had any questions.

• Platform: Google Meet
• Duration:1hr 
• No. of Questions: 15-20
• Difficulty level: Low

Results were announced at the end of the day after the interviews were done. Five people got placed from my college and I was one of them.