Eternal (Software Development Engineer) Interview Experience

Online Assessment The recruitment process started with an Online Assessment (OA) consisting of three coding questions to be solved within one hour. The questions were definitely not easy and required strong problem-solving skills along with experience in competitive programming. In my opinion, regular practice on platforms like LeetCode, Codeforces, and CodeChef is extremely important if you want to perform well in such assessments. The questions required both speed and accuracy, and the limited time made the challenge even tougher. Fortunately, I was able to solve all three questions and got shortlisted for the interview process. This gave me confidence going into the interview. Round 1 – Technical Interview The first interview started with a detailed discussion of my resume. The interviewer began by asking questions related to Git and GitHub, including their differences and some commonly used Git commands. The discussion then moved to authentication systems. I was asked about the difference between Google OAuth and NextAuth. then interviewer asked a few basic Linux commands all these are mentioned in my CV. After the resume discussion, the focus shifted to Object Oriented Programming. Some of the questions which i remember included:

What are the four pillars of OOP?
Explain the Diamond Problem.
Difference between shallow copy and deep copy. -detailed discussion on Virtual Pointers. Next came Computer Networks, the questions which i remember were:
Difference between TCP and UDP.
Explain the OSI model and its layers. Towards the end of the interview, I was given two DSA questions. The first one was a relatively straightforward array-based problem. The second question involved finding the largest rectangle in a binary (0-1) 2D grid.After discussing my solutions and approaches, the interview ended. I felt that the round had gone well and was hopeful about progressing further.

Eternal•SDE 1

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107 views• Nov 4, 2026Selected

Within about thirty minutes, my second interview started. This round was significantly tougher than the first one. The interviewer once again began with my resume and asked detailed questions about my previous internships at Jaguar Land Rover and my Mitacs Research Internship. He wanted to understand the exact work I had done, the challenges I faced, and the impact of my contributions. My project in cv mentioned fuzzy search functionality, so he asked me to write the pseudo code for implementing fuzzy search. The discussion then moved to Operating Systems. Some of the questions included:

Difference between processes and threads.
Deadlocks and real-life examples.
Mutex locks and practical scenarios where they can be used. The interviewer specifically asked me not to give textbook definitions and instead explain the concepts in simple words. Towards the end of the round, I was given a DSA problem that was quite interesting and required multiple levels of optimization. The problem involved searching for a target value in a 2D grid where the elements were sorted in increasing order, but not in the conventional row-wise or column-wise manner. Instead, the grid followed a spiral (or spinning) ordering. Basically the elements in the grid are increasing in a spiral pattern toward the center. I initially presented a brute-force solution. The interviewer then encouraged me to optimize it further. After discussing multiple approaches, I eventually proposed a binary-search-based solution with a time complexity of O(log(n×m)). The interviewer seemed satisfied with the final approach and the reasoning behind it. After the round, I was informed by the placement team that I had been shortlisted for the final round.

The final round was the HR interview. Compared to the technical rounds, this was much more conversational. Some of the questions included:

What is the most important learning from IIT Kharagpur?
What has been your biggest failure at IIT Kharagpur?
What do you expect from Eternal?
Various behavioral and personality-based questions. The discussion was smooth and focused mainly on understanding my experiences, mindset, and future goals. The Offer At the end of the HR round, I was informed that the final decision would be communicated within an hour. Personally, I felt satisfied with my overall performance and was quite confident about the outcome. Still, waiting for the final result felt much longer than it actually was.

Tips: To my delight, within about twenty minutes I received a call from a CDC department representative and his exactly remember his words till date he said: ”Please don't sit in any further placement processes for any other company “ . I genuinely cannot explain how happy I was at that moment. After months of preparation, countless coding problems, contests, and interview preparation sessions, finally receiving the offer felt incredibly rewarding. It remains one of the happiest moments of my journey at IIT Kharagpur. Preparation Strategy My placement preparation was based on consistency rather than last-minute effort. The resources that helped me the most were:

AlgoZenith Course
Striver's SDE Sheet
Regular participation in Codeforces contests
Regular participation in CodeChef contests
Daily problem solving on LeetCode I believe competitive programming contests are particularly useful because they simulate the pressure and time constraints of Online Assessments. Apart from DSA, I also spent significant time preparing core Computer Science subjects such as:
Operating Systems(studied from AlgoZenith)
Computer Networks(watch videos on yt from vivek gupta)
Object-Oriented Programming(watch playlist on yt from Saurabh Sukhla) Advice for Juniors If I had to give a few key suggestions to future batches, they would be:
Be consistent with DSA practice.
Participate in coding contests regularly.
Prepare core CS subjects thoroughly.
Know every line of your resume.
Think aloud during interviews so interviewers can understand your approach.
Trust your preparation and remain confident.

Eternal (Software Development Engineer)

Interview Breakdown

Round 1Round 1

Advanced Technical Interview

Eternal (Software Development Engineer)

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