Got the offerSoftware Development Engineer (SDE) at Ather Energy
- Difficulty
- Process took
- 2-3 Weeks
- Rounds
- 4
- Format
- Remote
- Applied via
- Referral
How it went
- Keep calm during tough questions, especially in system design. Interviewers appreciate when you adapt your approach mid-discussion.
- Share your thought process openly and don’t shy away from asking clarifying questions. Behavioral rounds are about honesty and reflection, so be genuine in your answers.
What they would tell you
- Keep calm during tough questions, especially in system design. Interviewers appreciate when you adapt your approach mid-discussion.
- Share your thought process openly and don’t shy away from asking clarifying questions. Behavioral rounds are about honesty and reflection, so be genuine in your answers.
How to prepare
- Brush up on array manipulation and tree traversal problems, focusing on edge cases. Practice optimizing solutions with appropriate data structures like stacks.
- For system design, study microservices and caching strategies, and be ready to discuss scaling and fault tolerance. Mock interviews can help build confidence for scenario-based and behavioral questions.
Round by round
- 1
Online Coding Test90 min
The initial filter round was a bit challenging but interesting. I had to solve two medium-level problems. The first was about rearranging an array to separate even and odd numbers, and I had to make sure I handled edge cases like negative numbers and zeros. The second problem was about binary tree zigzag level order traversal. I used a queue to traverse the tree and kept track of the levels, reversing the order every other level. It felt great to pass all the test cases, definitely gave me the confidence to keep going!
- 2
Technical Interview 160 min
This round started with discussing my machine learning project and then moved to a coding problem, removing adjacent duplicates from a string repeatedly until none remain. I first shared a brute-force approach but was guided to optimize it using a stack, a solution I was able to implement effectively. The system design portion focused on a notification system, emphasizing real-time updates, scalability, and user preference handling. The interviewer was supportive, making this round a great experience.
- 3
Technical Interview 260 min
This round challenged me to design a ride-sharing system for electric scooters. I sketched a microservices architecture covering users, rides, payments, and live scooter location tracking. We dove deep into caching strategies for frequently accessed data and scalability challenges for live features and dynamic pricing. The interviewer pushed me on edge cases like maintenance and downtime. When questioned about caching bottlenecks, I paused but quickly adapted my design to include distributed caching. Despite my moment of doubt, I was pleasantly surprised to clear this round.
- 4
Behavioral Interview45 min
The final round explored my teamwork, conflict resolution, and time management skills through scenario-based questions. I discussed handling technical disagreements, missed deadlines, and adapting to unfamiliar projects. One challenging question about balancing priorities made me nervous, but my thoughtful response seemed to resonate. A week later, I received the offer.
What came up
A candidate-reported account, lightly edited. Interview processes change by team and date.