Interview Experience: Salesforce SMTS Interview Experience

📌 Job Role: SMTS
🔢 Number of Rounds: 3
📜 Offer Status: Rejected
📍 Location: India
🔢 Year of experience : 5.5
👤 Candidate Name: Not disclosing due to signed NDA

Interview Process

I applied to Salesforce Bangalore and Frankfurt through their careers page. A recruiter reached out within a week, mentioning that they had seen my application for another role but wanted to process it for a different position in Bangalore.

I received an online assessment (OA) link the same day and attempted it after three days. After clearing the assessment, the next rounds were scheduled within three days. There was no elimination between Round 1 & 2. The process consisted of an OA, two technical rounds, and potentially a System Design + Hiring Manager round if the first two technical rounds were cleared.

Round 1 – Online Assessment

• Duration – 90 mins

• Difficulty - Medium

Problems:

1. Spiral Matrix – Problem Link

   • Solved completely, all test cases passed.

2. Find the longest time without meetings

   • Given a total time n and two arrays: start and end times of meetings, find the longest period without a meeting.

   • Example: n=10, start=[1,2,5,8], end=[2,2,6,10] → Answer = 2 (longest free slot is between 5 & 2, covering slots 3 & 4).

   • I got partial output (5/12 test cases) due to TLE. Couldn’t optimize further at the time, and still struggling to find an optimal approach.

Key Takeaways:

• Need to improve on optimizing solutions to avoid TLE.

• Practice time complexity analysis and efficient data structures.

Round 2 – DSA

• Duration – 60 mins

• Difficulty - Medium

Structure:

The first 10-15 minutes were spent on introductions and discussing my current project.

Problems:

1. Linked List with Random Pointer – Find the Minimum Distance to the End Node

   • Given a linked list where each node has a next pointer and a random pointer, calculate the minimum distance from the start node to the end node.

   • Used BFS and wrote a working solution. However, the interviewer wasn’t satisfied with my BFS implementation.

   • My approach took O(n+2), while an optimized version would be O(n+1) (both still O(n), but mine was less clean).

   • I refactored the code, but the interviewer didn’t seem convinced.

2. Policemen Catching Thieves – Problem Link (GFG)

   • Only 12 minutes were left for this question.

   • Came up with an O(nk) solution, but I wasn’t 100% sure if it worked for all cases.

   • The interviewer didn’t provide feedback or test edge cases.

Key Takeaways:

• Need to improve code quality and clarity in BFS/graph problems.

• Work on faster problem-solving to complete all questions within the time limit.

Round 3 – Low-Level Design & Coding

• Duration – 60 mins

• Difficulty - Hard

Problems:

1. LLD – Notification Library

   • Design a notification system supporting multiple types of notifications (email, SMS, push).

   • I struggled initially, missing a lot of things and taking hints from the interviewer.

   • Managed to come up with a workable solution, but it wasn’t clean or structured.

2. Longest Well-Performing Interval – Problem Link

   • The problem wording was different, but it was essentially this question.

   • I couldn’t figure out the optimal solution.

   • The interviewer provided a hint (similar to the first hint on LeetCode), which helped me understand the approach, but I couldn’t fully implement it.

Key Takeaways:

• Need more practice with LLD and real-world system design problems.

• Improve problem-solving speed to handle harder algorithmic questions in limited time.

• Time management is crucial in technical rounds.

Final Thoughts

The overall process was well-structured but challenging. While I could handle some parts well, I struggled with optimizing solutions under time constraints.

Things I Would Improve for Future Interviews:

1. Better preparation for LLD/System Design – More hands-on practice with designing scalable systems.

2. Stronger coding problem-solving skills – Focus on time complexity optimizations and problem-solving speed.

3. Time management – Need to pace myself better and get through problems faster.