I was contacted through a recruiter on LinkedIn. She described the company profile in great detail and explained the available roles, allowing me to choose the one that best fit my skills and interests. After setting up the phone interview, she sent me a detailed email explaining the interview process, what was expected, what qualities were evaluated, and tips for preparation. It was very useful for my preparation.

The phone interview was very professional. After a brief self-introduction, we jumped straight into the questions. The interviewer described the questions properly and clarified my doubts promptly. I walked through my thought process before writing code, and once or twice, he provided hints to direct me in the correct path. I chose Python to solve the coding problems and switched to Java for writing a Hive UDF. He provided ample time at the end for me to ask questions and offered proper explanations for them.

Overall, it was a very good experience, though I didn't clear the round. The programming questions were straightforward for someone who had practiced well. I believe I should have practiced more.

1. Find if brackets are balanced properly in a given string.

2. Find the sum of the contiguous subsequence with the maximum sum (the list contains both positive and negative integers).

3. Implement a Hive UDF for the given string. Return a score based on the sentiment words found (good: 1; average: 0; bad: -1). Example: 'good food, bad service' = 1 - 1 = 0.

4. How would you improve ETL throughput?