Before Crio, I was working in Bosch. I was not very happy with my role there and my main motivation to switch roles was to grow my career in software development.
I got the opportunity to interview with Blackhawk Network through LinkedIn. I believe the portfolio that we made at the end of the Crio program was the main reason my resume got shortlisted for the job.
The interview process consisted of 4 rounds and it went on for about a week.
Before every round, I prepared rigorously by skimming through all questions I could find on Glassdoor. I also practiced many related questions to the topics asked previously in Blackhawk Network interviews. In addition to that, I revised the project-related questions that Crio had prepared us for earlier in the program.
Round 1 - Online Assessment
I received an online assessment link that consisted of MCQs on REST API and SQL.
In addition to that, there were 2 questions that I had to complete and submit.
Q1: A public API was given and I was supposed to read the data from the API and do some basic calculations to give the output.
Q2: Focused on JavaScript/jQuery - I had to create an email validator.
Round 2 - Technical Personal Interview
In this round, I was interviewed by one of the Senior Engineers from the Blackhawk team. He asked me a medium-level programming question on LeetCode.
Once I completed that, he asked me questions related to my projects.
Topics discussed related to my projects:
- Databases (indexing, keys)
- Spring Boot (dependecy injection, Bean Scope)
I was able to answer these questions easily as most of these areas were covered in Crio sessions.
Round 3 - Hiring Manager Interview
In this round, I spoke with the Senior Engineering Manager I was going to report to in the case I got selected. I had a great interview experience with him.
The interview started off with a medium-level programming question on hashing on LeetCode.
This was followed by questions on Java fundamentals, multithreading, and caching.
I was comfortable with these topics as I have used them in my Crio projects.
Round 4 - Interview with Senior Director
After clearing the first 3 rounds, I was both happy and a bit nervous for the next round with one of the Senior Directors.
In this round, a few more questions like database design and I had to solve another medium-level programming problem on LeetCode.
At Crio we had sessions on load balancing and system design which helped me immensely.
Final round - HR round
This was more of a confirmation round. The discussion revolved around my reason for switching to Blackhawk Network and my expectations from the new job.
By the end of the day, I received an offer from Blackhawk Network.
Interview tips
- Make sure your fundamentals are strong for the tech stack you mention in your resume.
- Practice medium-hard level questions on topics like two pointer, recursion, sliding window, stacks, linked lists, etc.
- Approach every round with a calm state of mind :)
Topics to focus on
- Java
- Multithreading
- Spring Boot
- REST API basics
- Hashing
- Stacks & Queues
- Linked Lists
- Binary Search
- Two Pointers