This was my second time trying to get into SoFi. This time I interviewed with the Invest team. I thought the conversations went well, but I still got rejected. The market really is brutal right now.
There were 4 rounds total: a phone screen plus three virtual onsite (VO) rounds.
Phone screen: OOD principles, and implementing a multi-threaded task executor. I was given a class TaskExecutor that implements Semaphore, and I needed to implement initialization(), execution(), and acquire(). They also gave a set of Task subclasses, where each subclass needed to implement different behavior but all share the same interface — for example, MultiplyTask multiplies the input, takes x threads, and doesn't return when it finishes, while DivideTask divides the input, takes y threads, and returns when it finishes, etc. This round was testing code extensibility and maintainability. Result: pass.
VO: three rounds total — DSA, System Design, and Hiring Manager.
DSA: spent 20 minutes deep-diving into my projects — impact, design decisions, my role. The problem was a common GIF-style question, but with two extra requirements: given a list of strings in this order, ["id1", "name1", "tag1", "id2", "name2", "tag2", ...], return the second most common tag from the list. Additionally: if there's no second-most tag (meaning all tags have the same count), return "notag"; and if there are multiple tags tied for second place (i.e. "rank1", "rank2Tag1", "rank2Tag2", ...), return the first one from the list. This should have been a pretty easy problem, but my brain blanked for a second and I didn't get the first follow-up written, though I got the other two right. I also went with a heap for the implementation, which was a bit overkill, and I stalled a bit writing the comparator until the interviewer gave me a hint. Result: probably not great feedback on this round.
System Design: this round had two parts. The first part asked about some Java internals, like how garbage collection works, what a singleton is, what the OOP principles are, etc. The second part was the actual design question: design a system that broadcasts market price changes to users. Given a third-party vendor API to track market price changes for given symbols, where the API supports both REST and websocket, we want to notify users of changes to the stocks they're tracking. I proposed using pub/sub to broadcast the changes and long-polling the third-party vendor. It took less than 20 minutes to walk through, and the interviewer asked a few follow-ups but seemed like they didn't have much left to ask. The odd part was the interviewer kept saying not to worry about the users' watchlists, but I didn't really understand how you'd know which symbols to query without knowing the watchlist. Result: positive (the interviewer said they gave me a kudos, which I assume means positive, but the recruiter's final feedback said this round lacked depth — like, what, was I supposed to explain how pub/sub works internally??).
Hiring manager: the original interviewer had something come up and got swapped out for someone else (the wheels of fate turning...). It was more of a casual chat, pretty relaxed. The interesting part was at the end the interviewer asked me to teach them something I'd recently learned. Feedback: no strong signal on project impact.
Guess I still need more practice — I keep getting stuck at the BQ round.
And a bit of a complaint while I'm at it: interview difficulty really isn't low these days. Feels like you need 100/100 on every single round to have a shot at an offer — or is that just the norm now?
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