I applied through an employee referral. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Salesforce (San Francisco, CA) in Jun 2018
Interview
I had 4 rounds of interviews with a lunch break with the manager in the middle. The first round was related to system design & a relational DB. The middle two were pretty standard coding and problem-solving based rounds. The last one also had a coding question; we also went over the problem I worked on for the take-home coding assessment and some Javascript fundamentals and testing/QA mindset questions.
I'm posting this review because it was one of the most comfortable interviews I've ever been in. That's also why I accepted the job. I felt like I could actually talk to each person at the end of the interview and we discussed several parts of the company, including some benefits that sold me. I got along with the last person best who turned out to be my direct teammate!
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
I don't remember... I think the easiest was something about the Fibonacci sequence.
The technical interview was much tougher than I anticipated. I faced a DSA question related to word searches that required optimizing a brute-force approach with a Trie. It was intense, but the practice I’d done on PracHub the week before really helped solidify my understanding of the problem-solving techniques. The behavioral round felt lighter, focusing on teamwork and project experience. After a couple of days, I received an offer, which I happily accepted. Overall, it was a challenging yet rewarding experience.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Word Search II - given an m x n board of characters and a list of words, return all words that can be formed from sequentially adjacent cells; had to optimize the brute-force backtracking with a Trie to pass the time limit
The interview process started with an online coding assessment that included DSA and problem-solving questions. After clearing the test, I had two technical interview rounds focused on data structures, OOPs concepts, DBMS, and project discussion. The final round was with the hiring manager where they asked about teamwork, problem solving, and career goals. The interviewers were professional and the process was smooth overall.
Went through 3 rounds. First round was a technical interview - it was a take home assessment. I didn't pass the test cases but still went through to the next round. The onsite had 1 behavioral, 1 system design, and 1 technical Leetcode style interview. It was in person on a whiteboard.