One of the HRs from Intel contacted me initially by telephone and email for this position, based on my resume, which was already in Intel's internal systems since I had previously done an internship there.

The initial conversation focused on my interests and the details of the job description. The HR mentioned the hiring manager was interested in talking with me, so I had a telephonic interview with him within a week. He asked both technical and managerial questions. Since the position was related to Big Data Analytics, BI, and Enterprise Applications, some of the typical questions asked were:

• How do you see Big Data affecting business and organizations in the next 5 years?
• Typical challenges related to current analytics, Machine Learning, and BI techniques.
• What would be your major pain points when designing an enterprise application?
• Typical steps in building a machine learning/statistical model.
• How would you check if a model is performing well and what would you do to improve it?
• How analytics can be used to leverage insights in businesses.
• What are your typical expectations from your team members?
• Expectations of how a manager should take care of their team.
• Current salary, notice period, etc.

After this round, since I had provided references from my internship duration at Intel, the HR said he would directly connect me with a Technical Architect for the next round of interviews in a couple of days. I received a call the following week for a pure technical interview. I was mostly grilled regarding my current project, previous projects, skills, and interests. Some interesting questions asked were:

• Typical challenges faced in unsupervised learning.
• Differences between relational and non-relational (NoSQL) databases.
• Why choose NoSQL for a particular project and relational for another; what would be the difference if you used a different database?
• Object-oriented databases and how I used them in my project.
• Twitter Analytics based on some of my projects.
• Relational Databases, Normalization, why 3NF, 4NF, why not just 1NF?
• Benefits of NoSQL databases like MongoDB.
• Caching techniques and how they can be implemented in enterprise apps.
• Some specific business case-based problems.

It was a really long interview, but I believe the Technical Architect was quite satisfied with my responses and said I would need to come to the office for a face-to-face interview when I was free. The interview was scheduled for the following week.

This face-to-face interview was with the hiring manager again at their office. It was mostly a behavioral round, where some of the questions he asked were:

• Where do you see yourself in 2 years?
• Typical expectations from the job, team, and manager.
• What sets you apart from the rest?
• If the job demands you to work extra hours, are you up for the task?
• What if some of the technology you need to use is unfamiliar to you?
• How was your experience working at Intel (previously as an intern)?
• How much would you rate yourself technically out of 10?
• Assuming we hire you, when can we expect you to join us?

Considering the last question, I felt the interview went pretty well, and he said if everything goes well, one of the HRs would contact me with the compensation package and other details soon. I received an email and a call within 2-3 days with the details of the offered salary, benefits, etc. After I confirmed these and filled out some details, I received the offer letter from the staffing department within a week via email.

What advantage would MongoDB give you over MySQL for a particular project?