A friend referred me to a team manager. The team manager liked my resume and scheduled a phone interview.

The phone interview mainly involved informing me about the job requirements, gauging my interest, and confirming my willingness to relocate to the Intel Hillsboro location in Oregon.

I expressed my interest, and an on-site interview was scheduled within a week. The on-site interview lasted an entire day. It began with an hour-long presentation of my PhD dissertation work, followed by six technical and behavioral interviews, with a lunch break in between.

Some initial interview advice:

• Algorithms to learn by heart: bubble sort, selection sort, insertion sort, merge sort, quick sort, breadth-first search (BFS), depth-first search (DFS).
• Basic data structures: linked lists, hash tables, stacks, queues, heaps, binary search trees.
• Basic concepts: recursion, memory (stack vs. heap), tail recursion, dynamic programming, C++ class concepts like inheritance and polymorphism.

You can use the "Cracking the Coding Interview" book to learn most of the aforementioned topics.

Important note: Practice coding everything on a piece of paper, not on your computer. This will help build confidence and make the interview process go much smoother.

I interviewed with Intel twice. The first time, I applied for a frame automation engineer position. The interview went poorly because I lacked confidence due to not practicing on paper beforehand. When asked questions, I fumbled a lot, and time ran out. I was not given an offer for this position.

The second position I interviewed for was a CAD engineer. This interview went much better, and I received an offer for this position.

Interview questions at Intel depend on the position you apply for. There are usually two types of questions:

• Questions based on your research
• Coding/analytical questions

Automation Engineer Interview Questions:

Coding Questions:

• Write bubble sort, BFS, DFS algorithms.
• Write a recursive function to find a prime number.

Analytical Questions:

• C1. Given a coordinate, how would you determine if it lies within a set of coordinates that form a polygon (the problem is harder than it sounds).

CAD Engineer Interview Questions:

Analytical Questions:

• C3. How would you represent a set of polygons using a data structure – basically a layer in VLSI.
• C4. Given a set of polygons, determine if the distance between them crosses a given lambda value (DRC-related VLSI question).
• C5. Give an example of the hardest bug you encountered and what you learned after debugging it.
• C6. Given two sets of coordinates, for each coordinate in one set, determine the closest coordinate in the other set (determine in N log N complexity).