Blackhawk Network Software Engineer Interview Rounds

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.

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