I applied online. The process took 1 day. I interviewed at Tarka Labs in May 2023
Interview
I was contacted by HR and HR told me about the interview process. There was an initial discussion with HR and then followed by 2 rounds of interviews for DSA and system design and then a final round with the hiring manager.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
The first technical round was pathetic. In the First technical round, the interviewer asked me about the payment system architecture with all the different services being used for payment, requery, and refund process. I've explained everything about the role of each service and how a request travels and what happens in each step. I don't know why they are not convinced and they gave the feedback that I was not able to elaborate on the solution even though during the interview they didn't ask the question where they had the confusion. They asked coding questions based on a stack. I was able to code the solution and it worked. but they rejected saying that I should code it in the most optimal way in the first approach. generally, if there is a problem, one tries to solve it with a solution that can be thought of at that time and then try to optimize it. but they wanted to code in the most optimal way firsthand. after that, they asked basic questions which I was able to answer.
I applied in-person. The process took 5 days. I interviewed at Tarka Labs (Chennai) in Jan 2020
Interview
This was one of the most versatile interview experiences I've had.
The initial round was conducted over a Skype call where we discussed about a personal project of mine (Binary Tree Datastructure Implementation in Ruby). The interviewer and I paired on extending the functionality of this library I had written. I thoroughly enjoyed the interaction that lasted 2 hours at the end of which my questions were answered.
The second round was conducted in-person. The interview was carried out over a period of 5-6 hours and the experience was fulfilling. We discussed various topics including self balancing trees, scalable design, design patterns, the work culture at Tarka Labs and various tech stacks & their advantages.
The questions were specific to the tech stack I have used and general programming concepts.
I was glad to have gone through Tarka Labs' interview process as I left that interview knowing more than what I did when I walked in.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
How can you balance a binary tree if the data is given in ascending order.