My Journey Through the Senior Software Engineer (SSE) Interview Process at Deloitte

I recently went through the Senior Software Engineer (SSE) hiring process at Deloitte, and it was both challenging and rewarding. The process began with an online assessment, where I had to solve three algorithmic problems. I managed to solve around 70-80% of them, focusing on optimizing for time and space complexity rather than brute force. After clearing this, I was invited for the on-site interviews. The first round focused on problem-solving under pressure, where I solved problems like the Longest Substring Without Repeating Characters using a sliding window approach, and finding the Kth smallest element in a BST with in-order traversal. In the advanced DSA round, I designed an LRU cache using a doubly linked list and hash map, and tackled the Minimum Cost Path problem using Dijkstra’s algorithm. The system design round was centered on designing a scalable notification system, where I discussed microservices, API design, database schema, and scalability using Redis and Kafka. In the hiring manager discussion, we focused on work culture, agile practices, task prioritization, and collaborating with cross-functional teams