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Rejected

SDE-2 at Mindtickle

Difficulty
Process took
1-2 Weeks
Rounds
3
Format
Remote
Applied via
Email

How it went

  • The interview process can be structured and conversational, but expectations are high, especially for SDE-2 level roles.
  • If you face rejection, don’t treat it as a failure instead, see it as a signal of where you stand and what to focus on next.

What they would tell you

  • The interview process can be structured and conversational, but expectations are high, especially for SDE-2 level roles.
  • If you face rejection, don’t treat it as a failure instead, see it as a signal of where you stand and what to focus on next.

How to prepare

  • Be strong in graph problems, especially around traversals and connected components, companies often frame them in real-world scenarios.
  • Go beyond basics, practice harder variations of standard problems.

Round by round

  1. 1

    DSA60 min

    I was asked to find duplicate elements in an array, which was straightforward. But then came the follow-up, which was much more interesting. I was given a list of entities and their properties, something like entity1 -> p1 p2 p3 entity2 -> p4 p5 p3 entity3 -> p1 p3 p6 The catch was that properties are only considered duplicates if they match at the same index. And on top of that, the entities were transitive, so if entity1 is related to entity2, and entity2 is related to entity3, then entity1 should also be considered related to entity3. The goal was to build chains of related entities based on those matching indexed properties. I thought about it for a bit and realized this could be modeled as a graph problem, so I used DFS/Union-Find to find connected components. That helped group the entities that were transitively connected.

  2. 2

    DSA60 min

    I was given a complex variation of the merge intervals problem. It wasn’t the usual one, this version involved overlapping boundaries, multiple groupings of intervals, and required a more optimized merge strategy.

  3. 3

    Low-Level Design60 min

    I was asked to design a fully functioning Ludo game, covering all the standard rules dice rolls, player tokens, safe zones, turn logic, and win conditions. The interviewer expected either a complete working solution or at least well-structured class-level code with proper control flow. The biggest challenge was the scope, it was much broader than a typical LLD question. I managed to design the core classes and game flow, but couldn’t finish a fully working version within the time. I also missed a few edge rules and game state transitions, which hurt the completeness of the design.

What came up

MediumRemote2 3 years

A candidate-reported account, lightly edited. Interview processes change by team and date.

Sources