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Hello, fellow engineers. I hope you all are doing well. I recently cracked a company named Zocket and in this post, I’m going to discuss the interview experience. I’ll share all the details, such as the company name, questions that were asked, rounds, etc. By the way my post will be Software Development Engineer Inter – Backend.

Important:

This entire process was not based on DSA questions but rather on development skills and an engineering mindset. If you are reading this post to know which DSA questions Zocket asked, then you may leave.

How it started?

I work with different tech stacks. But my main focus is on backend, systems engineering, microservices, system architecture, and such kinds of stuff. Currently, I’m working mostly with Golang, so I wanted to do a backend-oriented internship with Golang. Then I started searching for open job postings. After doing some research, I came across a company named Zocket. I applied there with my resume and a cover letter. After a few days, I received a short interview invitation from them.

Interview Rounds

Quick Intro Call:

This round was taken by – Manoj Gawda

In this round, I was asked to give my introduction. So I gave a complete introduction about me, my skills, my achievements till now, etc. Then the interviewer told me about the company and job. He told me what I’d be doing. Then he asked me about my availability and timing. Whether I’m an instant joiner or not, How I’ll manage my internship along with my studies, etc. This round took around 20 minutes and went very well.

Notable Questions:

  1. Tell me about you.
  2. Tell me about your coding journey.
  3. Tell me about your past experience.
  4. How much time are you working with backend engineering?
  5. Can you join company instantly?

Assignment Round:

The next round was an assignment round. In this round, I was given a real-life development problem, and I had to implement that in GoLang. It was based on message brokers. There were no time constraints, as I was given around a week to implement the code. Also, with complete implementation, I was also asked to write unit tests wherever required. If I talk about the difficulty of this assignment, I’ll say that it was a medium-level assignment, as I had earlier experience with microservice architecture and message brokers. It took me around 2 days to implement the core logic of the software and around 1 day to write unit tests for it. Then I shared the assignment code through GitHub.

Notable Questions:

  1. A real-world assignment was given to me, and I had to implement it into code.

Technical Interview:

This was a completely technical round. In this, my technical skills were to be tested. It was supposed to be a DSA round first, but I asked the interviewer to take a technical round first, and he agreed. So the interviewer started with my assignment. He asked me to share my laptop screen and open the assignment code. He asked me to go through the code step-by-step. So I explained the code line by line, and he kept asking questions whenever he had them. After all of this, he started scanning my resume and asked about my past internship experiences and projects that I’d completed.

Then I opened my GitHub and showed him my projects, and we kept talking about technical things and software engineering. The interviewer was very impressed with my code, resume, and GitHub profile. At this moment, I already have the feeling that I’ve cleared this round. This round took around 45 minutes, and I was very relaxed throughout the interview. The interviewer never made me feel nervous, and this round was taken by a senior software engineer from the company.

Notable Questions:

  1. Which library did you use for the message broker?
  2. Why are you using design patterns?
  3. How are you interacting with PostgreSQL?
  4. What have you done in GoLang till now?
  5. Are you familiar with concurrent programming?
  6. Several questions about my assignment.
  7. How are you downloading data from a remote URL?
  8. How are you compressing the images?
  9. Some talks talk about external APIs.

Technical Interview II – Final

Now it’s time for the final interview that was to be taken by the engineering lead of the company. The interview started around 4:20 PM and ended at 5:00 PM. This was again a technical interview, but with the higher authority of the company. We keep discussing my past experience, questions on assignments, scaleability of code, Golang, etc.

Notable Questions:

  1. Where should you use a message broker?
  2. What are the benefits of gRPC?
  3. How do you write scaleable code for production?
  4. Why didn’t you use gRPC instead of Kafka?
  5. What was I doing in my previous internship?
  6. Which is efficient for the assignment? gRPC or Kafka?

Overall Experience

So I had a very positive overall experience. From the first round to the last round, I never felt complicated or confused. Everything was straight-forward. All three interviewers were very supportive. At last, I want to say thank you for the opportunity.

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