There were no coding questions; only MCQs were present. There were 30 MCQs in 75 minutes: 10 technical MCQs in 45 minutes and 20 aptitude MCQs in 30 minutes. Accuracy was very important. Those with the maximum number of correct answers were shortlisted for the interview. Around 24 students out of approximately 250 were shortlisted for the Software Engineer role. I was one of them.

The interviewer was in a bit of a hurry, so he didn’t waste time with the introduction. He directly jumped into questions.

Explain the endianness of a machine and write a C code to know the endianness of your machine.

He gave me a 32-bit hexadecimal address and asked me to add code to my previous code to know the content at that address.

What is the cache coherence problem? He also asked if my code was prone to the cache coherence problem. I answered yes.

Then he gave me an API and asked where I could use that to remove cache coherence from my code.

What is cache invalidation? Again, he gave me an API and asked me to use that in my code.

What is memory alignment?

Write a C function that takes two arguments: size and alignment. The function should return a memory block of the given size with the given alignment.

I had written the code using malloc to allocate the memory block and then made some changes to make the block align to the given alignment.

Some discussion of the free system call and how I could use that in my code.

After 5 minutes, I got to know that I had made it to the second round, and I would get a call from HR.