EPAM India Interview Experience

EPAM India visited my institution to hire interns/PPOs for their Hyderabad location.

The Hiring Process was as follows:

1. Online Test
2. Group Discussion
3. Technical Interview – 1
4. Technical Interview – 2 (optional)
5. HR Interview

• The first part of the technical test included MCQs (Basic core concepts, Aptitude, Logical questions). Try to be quick as time can be a constraint. The questions were easy but required critical thinking due to time-bound.
• The second part of the technical test included 3 – 5 coding questions.

The 2 coding questions I remember were:

1. Tallest Candle Count – You are in charge of the cake for a child’s birthday. You have decided the cake will have one candle for each year of their total age. They will only be able to blow out the tallest of the candles. Count how many candles are tallest.
2. Eaten Bananas – There is a special kind of banana tree that grows bananas every day for n days. On an ith day, the tree grows bananas[i] bananas that will rot after days[i] days, that is on the day i + days[i] the bananas will be rotten and cannot be eaten. On some days, the banana tree does not grow any bananas, which are denoted by bananas[i] == 0 and days[i] == 0. You decided to eat at most one banana a day (to keep the deficiencies away). Note that you can keep eating after the first few days. Return the maximum number of bananas that you can eat.

If the GD Round is self-managed i.e. the recruiter won’t interfere in the discussion, TAKE THE LEAD. Introduce the topic and summarize it at the end as well. Be confident and use good vocabulary while speaking. in my case, the topic was the impact of Social Media on Society & especially on students.

You should know your resume. Top to bottom. They asked me about my projects which were on Machine Learning and Web dev. I was asked to explain the working of the ML model and the accuracy etc. You should know every aspect of your project and should be able to put out the SDLC of the project.

Pen and paper coding questions were asked:

1. Given a string, return char and its occurrence { ABC: a3b2c4 }
2. Reverse a string
3. Two Sum Problem (asked to optimize)

I was asked to code in Java, Javascript or Python, whichever language I am comfortable with.

• Puzzle: Given 10 bags of Infinite number of coins in each bag. Every coin in every bag weighs 1 gm EXCEPT one bag in which the coins weigh 1.1 gm each. Find the bag that has faulty coins. You have a digital weighing machine and can weigh only ONCE.
  Solution: Iterate from bag 1 to bag 10. Take 1 coin from bag 1, 2 coins from bag 2, 3 from bag…. and 10 from bag 10. The total weight should be 10 gm but because the weight of the faulty coin is 0.1 gm more, it will be reflected in the total weight. eg. if bag 4 has faulty coins, then the total weight would 10.4

This round was very similar to the previous round. The interviewer asked me questions about my resume and focused more on my internships. I was asked about my contribution and role in the internship. As I also had 1 project on the MERN stack, I was asked questions on React, Redux, components, etc. This round also included dry-run coding questions.

At the time of my interview, Technical Interview – 2 was only for some people. If in TI-1, the interviewer has over 10-15 years of experience, there will be no TI-2 for you.
In other cases, if the TI-1 Interview is not experienced enough, you will have to go through round 2.

I was asked about my family background and what they do, where I live, etc. In case of relocation, how will you manage it? Then we had some situational and scenario-based questions. I was asked about my biggest fear.
HR round is all about your confidence and vocabulary. There were no technical questions in this round. The HR later asked me about my in-hand offers and why would I join EPAM over these offers.