SDE-III at Oracle

How it went

What they would tell you

How to prepare

Round by round

1. 1

   DSA + Behavioral 190 min

   Behavioral Questions:

   • What excites you about your current work?
   • Tell me about a time you improved the codebase.
   • Share a time you made a mistake, what did you learn?
   • Have you ever proactively prevented a bug?
   • Container With Most Water
   • Top K Frequent Elements
2. 2

   HLD60 min

   This round started with a question why I want to join Oracle again, which gave me a chance to share what I valued about my past experience there and what draws me back. After that, we dove into the high-level design of my most recent project. The interviewer asked some thoughtful questions, pointing out potential loopholes in the design and pushing me to explain how I would improve it if I had the chance to do it again.

3. 3

   DSA + Behavioral 260 min

   Behavioral Questions:

   • When did you reduce project scope strategically?

   • How did you bridge a knowledge gap in your team or personally? DSA Problem: Build a friend recommendation system from an undirected graph.

   • Node = person

   • Edge = friendship

   • For each person, recommend a next-level friend (not direct), having max common friends

   • In case of tie, pick the lowest index Approach: Graph traversal, common neighbor count, optimization using indegree/outdegree

4. 4

   System Design60 min

   This round was focused on designing a Stock Broker System. The conversation quickly turned technical, diving into the architecture of a real-time trading platform. A big part of the discussion was around achieving ultra-low latency, in the range of milliseconds or even nanoseconds. I was asked how I’d handle trade matching, incorporate message queues, and reduce network overhead without compromising throughput. We also discussed the tricky balance between data persistence and maintaining high system throughput, especially under heavy load. The interviewer was clearly looking for both design clarity and awareness of performance-level engineering challenges.

5. 5

   Final Tech + Behavioral Wrap-up60 min

   Behavioral:

   • Ownership, mistakes, decision-making reflections

   • Collaboration and impact-based stories DSA:

   • Revisit of problems from Round 1, but asked to implement using an alternative approach (likely to test flexibility and optimization ability)

What came up