SDE - 1 at Yext

How it went

What they would tell you

How to prepare

Their background

Round by round

1. 1

   Coding and Debugging60 min

   I was given five small code snippets, each with bugs involving flag checks, variable assignments, or simple logic errors. The task was to fix at least four out of five within 30 minutes. And remaining 30 minutes, I was asked to solve one DSA problem centered on graph traversal, either using BFS or DFS.

   • Graph traversal
2. 2

   DSA60 min

   I was asked the "Number of Laser Beams in a Bank" problem, where I had to figure out how many laser beams could be formed between security devices represented in a 2D grid. My approach was to first understand the rules clearly, each floor is a row, and each '1' is a device. I counted the number of devices on each non-empty floor and ignored completely empty rows. Then, I noticed that the number of beams formed between any two consecutive non-empty floors is just the product of the device counts on those floors. So, I simply multiplied the counts of each consecutive pair of non-empty rows and added them up to get the answer. I explained my logic and reasoning step-by-step, keeping the solution simple and efficient.

   • Number of Laser Beams in a Bank
3. 3

   Coding Round60 min

   This round was quite practical, more like a real engineering task. I received several API endpoints and was asked to fetch, process, and aggregate data to build a leaderboard of the top 10 players, based on specific criteria provided. The round had two parts, the first part (core leaderboard task) was mandatory, while the second part included three bonus sub-problems, such as implementing different sorting options or advanced filters.

4. 4

   Behavioral & Cultural Fit60 min

   The final round was non-technical, focusing on soft skills and cultural alignment, questions about how I collaborate in teams, my approach to tough problems, and scenarios related to conflict resolution and working in ambiguous situations.

What came up