Opening the technical round, I was taken aback when they asked me to implement a thread-safe LRU cache, which I had just practiced on prachub.com during my prep. We spent a lot of time discussing different locking strategies, and I had to explain how to extend the cache for TTL-based eviction. It felt quite intense, and though I received an offer, I ultimately declined as the team dynamics didn’t seem like the right fit for me. The coding question was definitely a highlight, and I'm grateful for the targeted prep I had done.
Difficult interview
Application
I applied through an employee referral. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Two Sigma in May 2022
Interview
You’ll get a test to do on your own time. 3 hours of medium or less LC type questions. An HR phone call. A phone interview with some dev questions and one coding question that is not hard.
The final round is 6 hours, 3 coding and 3 behavioral and maybe some system design. The coding questions just take too much time to properly do. By the time I was done asking questions to clarify what was needed I was already running short on time. 2 of the 3 coding questions required a lot of clarification. I think they could have spent less time on my resume and more on the requirement. They need to frame these type of requirements first instead of only having me read and ask questions. Once you notice you’re running out of time it leads to bad decisions. This is not how we work in the real world. You want to reward people for making sure they’re are following requirements, not pit them against a clock.
All the interviewers were professional and nice though.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
The first question was for a stock trading algorithm but is framed poorly. The graphics provided suggest things that are not true. I did ask and it was clarified but overall it’s just not framed well. I normally don’t have such a hard time figuring out requirements. It’s honestly a straight forward problem but something about the presentation just takes too much time to clarify.
You should remove this question or explain better please.
First you have to do Hackerrank, which is doable but can be tricky. Then they like to screen your coding with leetcode like problems. After that, they start screening your design skills and general technical depth.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
leetcode + design, tech deep dive, very similar to the Big Tech
I applied through a staffing agency. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Two Sigma (New York, NY)
Interview
Had 3 rounds of Technical Interviews which I cleared easily. Recruiter told me that there would be few behavioral interviews once the headcount freeze would be lifted. It has been more than a year now and even after several follow-ups haven't received any response from the company. It also appears that I am not alone and there are many others who have cleared interviews but were kept on hold due to unavailability of headcount. 2S needs to stop wasting precious time of candidates if they do not intend to hire.
