My Interview Experience in KLA- Tencor for SQE
Hola everyone. This is Kavya, a third-year student pursuing Data Science at Coimbatore Institute of Technology.
I am writing this blog to document my experience attending the interview for an SQE intern at KLA-Tencor in the Women’s Drive.
The first round consisted of an online assessment with 15 aptitude questions testing grammar, quantitative, verbal, and logical reasoning, with one or two questions from deep learning. The total time window was around 1 hour. I felt like there was ample time for each question. I completed it in around 53 minutes, and time is a concern here. We were also asked to submit a copy of our resume before starting the test, along with a short description of our strengths that we had depicted through our project.
The results came out the next day, and we were invited for an offline interview at their Chennai office the following week itself. The company provided free accommodation for a day at a hotel.
The Day
On the day of the interview, we arrived at the office and were seated in the waiting room. One by one, according to the order of selection, we were called for the first round. Priorly, we were informed to expect around 3–4 rounds of interviews.
In the first round, the interviewer asked me to give a short intro about myself and my resume. He then proceeded to give the first programming question, which was:
https://www.hackerrank.com/challenges/validating-credit-card-number/problem
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It was slightly similar to the problem above. I was asked to write the optimal approach as code on the paper provided to me. I explained my approach and the code as I wrote it, then explained the time complexity of the code. I was also questioned about generalizing the code and how this could be used for some other applications. I was further prompted to explain how the application would work in real-time. It’s advised to research KLA before the interview, understand what they do, and have a basic idea.
I was also asked about solutions to prevent memory leaks and buffer overflow if the application were to encounter them. It’s good to brush up on the concepts of OOPS beforehand.
Then, I was presented with the second question, which was to find the longest palindromic substring from the given string.
https://leetcode.com/problems/longest-palindromic-substring/description/
Here, I explained both the brute force and optimal approach with the code, along with an example to showcase its working.
Then, we were asked to move to the waiting room, and I was called for the second round of the interview. In the second round, I had two interviewers.
I was presented with a problem to store the website log records and identify the valid users and the time spent on each page of the website.
I first discussed the variety of data structures I would use to store data, ranging from lists to databases. Finally, I was asked to write the code for validating the user. I did this using regular expressions along with connectivity to MongoDB.
Unfortunately, I did not proceed to the third round. But this was my first interview experience, and I gained an abundance of knowledge, which has helped me in my future interviews.
Every interview, whether successful or not, is a stepping stone to growth. What truly matters is the lessons learned, the confidence built, and the resilience developed along the way. If you ever face setbacks, remember that they are not the end of your journey but rather a push toward something even better.
To those preparing for their interviews — keep learning, keep improving, and most importantly, believe in yourself. Your hard work will pay off, and the right opportunity will come your way. Keep striving, and success will follow!
