The interview process went smoothly. There was a telephonic screening round, after which a face-to-face interview was scheduled. There were five rounds of interviews, each lasting for about an hour. The final round was a mix of technical and managerial aspects.

The opening was for one of their cloud teams. They were looking for expertise in OOPS, data structures, and kernel concepts.

Explain the projects on your resume. Follow up with questions on the same.

• Find if a number is a power of 2 in constant time.
• Reverse a linked list.
• Sort a linked list.

Couple of design questions were asked:

1. Design a lift.
2. Design a music player with a given number of states (play, pause, stop, rewind). The player has to transition between states and work as desired. Basically, they wanted to see if you are aware of the state design pattern and if you can implement it.
3. Singleton pattern and questions around thread safety.

Some basic kernel concepts:

1. Multithreading, mutex, semaphore.
2. Thread vs. process. When to prefer which one.
3. Address space, memory management.
4. Design a program with two threads that read from a given input array containing integers. One thread prints odd numbers, and the other prints even numbers. In one pass over the array, the program should print whether the number is odd or even using these threads.