I applied through an employee referral. The process took 2 months. I interviewed at Salesforce (San Francisco, CA) in Feb 2020
Interview
The Interview process was pretty smooth overall. Met really nice people and had a great interview experience. The only downside was how long it took to go from the first step to the onsite which was about ~1.5 months but I guess that just comes with the size of such a large company.
The steps were as follows:
1. Phone screen with the recruiter (~15 minutes)
2. Phone screen with Hiring Manger (~ 1 hour) -> Personality fit/Behavioral + resume
3. HackerRank Challenge (3 hours -> Algo question)
4. Phone Screen with Engineer ( 1 hour -> Algo and databases)
5. Onsite (6 Interviews: 2 Behavioral and 4 technical) -> Total 5.5 hours with a behavioral interview over lunch.
Offer within 1 week of Onsite.
The technical interview was much tougher than I anticipated. I faced a DSA question related to word searches that required optimizing a brute-force approach with a Trie. It was intense, but the practice I’d done on PracHub the week before really helped solidify my understanding of the problem-solving techniques. The behavioral round felt lighter, focusing on teamwork and project experience. After a couple of days, I received an offer, which I happily accepted. Overall, it was a challenging yet rewarding experience.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Word Search II - given an m x n board of characters and a list of words, return all words that can be formed from sequentially adjacent cells; had to optimize the brute-force backtracking with a Trie to pass the time limit
The interview process started with an online coding assessment that included DSA and problem-solving questions. After clearing the test, I had two technical interview rounds focused on data structures, OOPs concepts, DBMS, and project discussion. The final round was with the hiring manager where they asked about teamwork, problem solving, and career goals. The interviewers were professional and the process was smooth overall.
Went through 3 rounds. First round was a technical interview - it was a take home assessment. I didn't pass the test cases but still went through to the next round. The onsite had 1 behavioral, 1 system design, and 1 technical Leetcode style interview. It was in person on a whiteboard.