Squarepoint Intern Software Engineer Interview Experience — Two Onsite Rounds, Rejected After a Two-Week Wait

The first round was an OA — I already posted about that separately, so check it out if you get the chance.

After the OA I did two rounds of VO. Three rounds in total.

Round 1:

This interview was with a junior software engineer. He asked a few simple resume questions first — nothing to worry about, the interviewer just wants to understand your background.

After that he asked some technical questions, like what is an index, why not index every column. These were all database-type questions.

Then he asked some Python fundamentals questions, like what is immutable, how is a hashmap implemented, how do you insert an item into a hashmap, what's the time complexity of a hashmap.

After that there was a coding question. This one was pretty easy — he asked me to build a class to insert/update/remove data. It was obvious this needed a hashmap, so you just had to implement the class based on what the question asked. Then he asked some exception handling questions. Also nothing to worry about — you just needed to use try/except, the only thing was figuring out where to put it (in the function call, not inside the class).

Round 2:

The interviewer for this round was the team lead. The questions were also simple — what is a tuple, can you do tuple += (1, 2), what's the time complexity of a tuple.

Then the coding question was a simple if/else, but you needed to use %. Something like: if divisible by xx do this, divisible by xx do that.

Conclusion: even though I think I did fine, maybe I just wasn't the intern the interviewer was looking for. I don't know what kind of intern they wanted, because I got rejected.

HR took two weeks after the second round to send me the rejection.

Even though I got rejected, good luck to everyone else with your interviews!