Arcesium Interview Experience for SDE Intern

Arcesium visited our campus ( NIT ) in July 2023 at the starting of 3rd year of the college, offering a 2-month Summer Internship for 2024.

There were a total of 5 Rounds ( 1 Online Round ( Day 1 ) + 4 Interview Rounds( Day 2) ).

Eligibility: CSE, IT ( CPI > 7 ), and ECE ( CPI > 8 )

Job Profile: Software Developer Intern ( Batch – 2025 ).

In spite of eligibility given a shortlisting was made once again before the Online Round and only selected candidates were allowed to take the online round ( 150 were shortlisted to take the test ). Even the students that fulfilled the criterion who would make it to the top 150 based on the CGPA were not allowed to sit for the Online Assessments.

Round 1: Online Round ( 1 hr 20 min )

There were 3 sections with each section bounded by time with a 25% negative marking for each wrong answer.

Section 1 – MAT 15 questions 20 minutes

Filled with Quantitative aptitude questions which were not easy that’s for sure Topics – Profit Loss, Work & Time, Probability, Basic Maths, etc.

Time alloted -> Not sufficient

Hardness -> Medium

Section 2 – CS Fundamentals 15 questions 15 minutes

A lot of java pseudo code questions ( I code in C++ but those were quite tough for java users too ) with oops, threads, etc all in java were asked, and there were questions on AVL tree, heaps, OS, etc.

Time alloted -> Sufficient

Hardness -> Medium to hard

Section 3 – 2 Coding Questions 45 minutes

Check for the valid index ( Sum before index = Sum after index)

Time Needed to Inform All Employees (LeetCode)

Verdict -> 15 Shortlisted for interviews

Round 1: Coding Round ( 50 min ): Offilne

The interviewer was a Lead Engineer at Arcesium and she took my resume and had a look at it for like 5 minutes. Then, immediately after that she gave me a question on Dynamic Programming ( Minimum Path Sum ). I explained all the approaches from recursion, memoization, tabulation and space optimisation and also coded them all. While this act took like 30 minutes in total, then she gave another question on priority queues ( Top K Frequents Elements ) in response to which I explained the approach and also coded it. While time was already completed, she gave me a question and just asked how I would have approached it. The question was in simulation in response to which I gave a Breadth First Search approach to which she was seemed to be satisified. However, the more optimised approach would have been to reverse the question and then simulate but nevertheless, this was how my first Round ended.

Verdict -> Selected for the next round. ( 8 were selected for the next rounds )

Round 2: Project Discussion and CS Fundamentals ( 50 min ): Offline

The second round began after a gap of 1.5 hours which was taken by the CEO of the company. It started with a brief discussion on my resume discussing about each and every highlighted points. Then, the discussion moved on to my projects to which I gave an overview and about the future scopes of this projects. Then, I was given a standard Sliding Window question to which took some time and coded and explained my approach with a dry run. Then, I was asked what my favorite subject was. I responded with DBMS. In response, he took a discussion on Durability ( ACID properties ). I explained everything I could remember. This way my interview ended.

Verdict -> Rejected ( 4 were selected for the next rounds )

I didn’t understand why I was rejected, maybe because they wanted to conclude all the set of interviews in just one day and at the end of the day, they selected 2 people.