I had an interview drive in Hyderabad in December 2018.

That day, there were three rounds.

• The first and second were technical rounds with questions from Data Structures and Algorithms. The questions were mainly on arrays, linked lists, and chessboard-based problems. Both interviewers were good; they increased the difficulty of the questions with each subsequent one if I answered the previous one correctly.

• The third round was a design round. The interviewer was a team lead who presented a good design problem. He was really engaged in the interview and asked questions covering all scenarios. He tried to steer the solution in the wrong direction to check if I could pull it back in the right way. It was the best round. At the end, he was very happy with our discussion and gave his appreciation. We talked for a while, and then I left.

As it was late in the evening, I was asked to leave.

A week later, I was called for the fourth and final round, which was with a senior manager. He asked all kinds of questions, from technical to design. He also inquired about the types of problems I had solved previously, which was the toughest, and so on. He also asked me to design a system that provides suggestions for what to type in a search engine. We discussed this for some time.

Finally, we sat down, I asked him some questions, and at the end, we shook hands and I left.

A week later, I received a call from HR and was told that I had cleared the interview. I was super happy :)

Design a system that shows suggestions in a search engine as you type.