Hello Everyone,

Abhiroop here.

Today, I wanted to share my interview experience for Myntra SDE Intern position with all of you. I will try to make sure that you gain something useful out of it. Also this is my first post at Medium so please feel free to give suggestions or appreciate if it is of any help to you.

Details of Offer:

Mode: On-Campus

Position: SDE Intern

Duration: 6months

This was an on-campus opportunity which comprised of 1 coding round followed by 2 technical rounds.

Coding Round:

Initially, there was a coding test on the Mettl platform that spanned for 1.5 hours. The test consisted of three coding questions of varying difficulty levels (easy to medium) and 10–15 multiple-choice questions related to code output and identifying errors in lines of code.

For a more in-depth description of the coding questions. Click Here

After the coding round, 15 students were shortlisted for a face-to-face interview. The interviews were promptly scheduled for the next day, immediately after the coding test.

Interview Process

• Technical Round 1
• Technical Round 2

Technical Round 1

The first round was scheduled with Frontend Lead with over 7 years of experience. The discussion commenced with brief introduction from his end followed by mine.

This wasn’t a machine coding round, rather I was asked to explain my approach and, if necessary, writing out the code during the discussion.

The discussion began with question about which data structures, I am proficient in. To which I responded arrays, graphs and trees.

He began by asking me to explain binary search, its time complexity, and the reasoning behind using the formula l + (r — l) / 2. Subsequently, he presented a follow-up question related to a modified version of binary search.

1st Question: Search In Rotated Sorted Array

It was a fairly easy question for me, as I had encountered it previously. I proceeded to explain the approach and provided the entire code to him.

2nd Question: Check If Graph Is Bipartite

This time I was only needed to explain the approach using a sample graph. I did not needed to write the code, as the interviewer was satisfied with my explanation.

3rd Question: Check If A Tree Is BST or BT

I initially explained the boolean approach, where the return value is left & right. However, he requested an alternative approach. After a few minutes, I came up with the {minimum, maximum} approach (by Striver) where we basically check if the node lies in specified range or not.

The round concluded after 45 minutes. Towards the end, I inquired about his role at Myntra.

Technical Round 2

15 minutes after the end of first round, I was called for the second technical round. This round was conducted by Tech Lead of Backend Team at Myntra with around 7 years of experience.

The second round commenced with a review of questions asked in first round. He asked about my previous internship experience. Details about specific product that I worked on and the tech stack involved.

Further, he went through my resume and asked about some of my projects. He focused on what solution does this offer(referring to a project named Swachhta). Additionally, he asked if I have any projects that are hosted? Interviewer asked, “Suppose a website is hosted. Then how would you handle a sudden increase in traffic on your website?”. This discussion on project lasted till 25–30 minutes.

He communicated that this round will be of around 50 minutes. In this round he will present a question and I need to come up with a solution. He mentioned that he would provide hints if needed during the process.

He explained the problem statement which is as follows:

There’s a function called bool knows(int a, int b) that returns a boolean value, indicating whether person 'a' knows person 'b'. The integers range from 1 to N. The task is to identify the prime minister, defined as a person who is known by everyone else (from 1 to N) but does not know anyone else.

The conditions are as follows:

bool knows(any number, prime minister) = true

bool knows(prime minister, any number) = false

It’s important to note that the specific boolean values returned by the knows function are uncertain and can be random, but the two conditions mentioned above must be satisfied.

For example, if we have an array arr = [1,2,3,4,5] and designate 4 as the prime minister, the boolean function knows(4,1), knows(4,2), knows(4,3), and knows(4,5) would all return false because the prime minister knows no one. On the other hand, knows(1,4), knows(2,4), knows(3,4), and knows(5,4) would all return true since everyone else knows the prime minister.

After he explained the question, I cleared up some of my doubts and then understood the question completely. I asked about the constraints but I missed to ask if it is necessary that the prime minister will exist , what if it does not exist. (When i started to code he pointed out this mistake).

First Approach:

I explained brute force approach where we would check for every possible pair and count for number of true and false. However, this approach would have a time complexity of O(N²).

Second Approach:

In second approach, I decided to form a directed graph and compute the indegree and outdegree of each node during graph formation. Then look for leaf nodes where indegree[node] = n-1 and outdegree[node] = 0 as those node will be potential prime minister. Despite this the time complexity remains O(N²) due the formation of directed graph.

After this interviewer asked, “Can you attempt to further optimize the solution and consider a greedy approach?”

Final Solution:

As he emphasized a “greedy” approach, meant that time complexity can be reduced to O(N) i.e. we need to eliminate pairs and need not check all pairs.

• This means if A knows B, then A can’t be a prime minister. Remove A and B might be the prime minister.
• Also, if A doesn’t know B, then B can’t be a prime minister. Remove B and A might be the prime minister.

Finally, I came up with a greedy solution with time complexity of O(N) and space complexity of O(1).

Interviewer was satisfied with the solution but he gave me a test case to dry run. While doing the dry run I understood that there could be a scenario where there’s no prime minister. Interviewer mentioned that I should have clarified this possibility in the beginning ,he suggested to return -1 if it does not exist.

In the final 10 minutes, he asked an interesting question: “How would you reduce the rate-limit of the bool knows(int A, int B) function since it gets called simultaneously for checking relation between A and B.”

This was my first encounter with such question, so I kept thinking for some data structure to use. When 5 minutes were left, interviewer asked “Can you see in your code if there are some overlapping?”.

I realized it is dynamic programming and answered that we can use matrix dp[A][B], to store boolean values. This way we can check the dp matrix first before directly calling bool knows(int a,int b)function.

The interview concluded, and I wasn’t entirely sure about how well it went because there were moments where I faced challenges, and the interviewer provided several hints to guide me through.

Next Day, results were announced, and I received confirmation for my selection.