My name is Spandan Kumar Sahu. I am a 4th year undergraduate, dual degree in Computer Science. I got an internship offer from Tower Research for summers 2019. Prior to that, I did Google Summer of Code, 2017 and went for a FT at ITRI, Taiwan in summers 2018.
Intern Preparations:
Following advice from seniors and batchmates , I went through articles on Geeksforgeeks and Interviewbit. Though due to lack of time I could only skim through the articles, I would strongly suggest to code the questions you practice in these websites. I also revised core subjects like OS, DBMS, Networks, Algo and DS.
Interview experience:
My Tower Research interview wasn’t quite the standard interview that I had heard of. I wasn’t asked any challenging algorithmic question, nor was I grilled on pretty hard stuffs from the core subjects. The interview, which occurred via video conference, was primarily focused on my past internships. Both of my past internships were in Ceph, a distributed data storage system. I was thoroughly questioned on my knowledge of Ceph, data consistency and related concepts from OS and Networks. I was asked a few questions from Unix/Linux based system administrations. A simple algorithmic programming question was followed by more system programming questions. From my understanding and interactions with friends from other IITs, Tower Research seems to be actively looking for people in system architecture and design, and is ready to compromise on CG partially for that matter. So people, who don’t have a mighty GPA and don’t flatter ML/AI, might go for cloud based systems and other system architectures, specifically focusing on dockers, kubernetes, ceph, kafka, redis and other such production stage cloud services.
I also qualified for GS interview. GS interview seemed to be a standard one, with the number of interview rounds depending on the number of sections one cleared in their written test. There they asked algorithmic questions, time complexity, few probability based questions and some software engineering and a few PDS questions. The written round consisted of questions from probability and statistics, PDS types questions, and an algorithmic question (based on DP). And as you might have heard, scoring high in a particular section is more beneficial than scoring high over-all, in the written round.