Dev Diary: Facing Software Engineering Interviews as a Fresher in BD

I graduated from department of CSE, BUET in March 2025. I started applying to companies a bit earlier — around December. I applied to a lot of places—some opportunities came through campus recruitment, while others I pursued on my own, mostly via LinkedIn. My journey is mostly filled with rejections. Despite the setbacks, each interview taught me something new and helped me improve. This blog is a recap of my interview experiences.

FringeCore 💼

This was the first company I applied to. I came across their job post in a Facebook group called talk.js and applied for the Backend Engineer position. It was in around the first week of December 2024.

The first round was a 24-hour challenge with six tasks. The problems were really fun. You can check them out here: FringeCore Backend Challenges

After that, I was shortlisted for the second round, which they called “Cha Adda”. Instead of one-to-one interviews, they arranged a meeting with all the candidates (there was like 8-9) and some of their engineers. They asked about our experience, the solutions of the challenges of the first round, some basic DSA and technical questions etc. This round was in Bangla.

The interview was pretty good in my opinion but I got rejection mail after a few days :/

Office Location - Gulshan 2

Salary - 50k

---

Therap (BD) Ltd. 📄

Therap was the first company that came for campus recruitment in our batch. They were recruiting for five different roles: Software Dev, ML-NLP, ML-Vision, DBA, SQA. I applied for the SDE role. Therap’s hiring process includes a written test, 1-2 technical interviews, 1 HR interview.

Written Test

In the written test there were around 11 questions in total. One was a descriptive question asking about my most significant moment in BUET or something like that, one was a DB schema design, one was based on OOP concepts. The rest were leetcode style problems.

You can find the questions here → Interview BD - Therap SWE.

Technical Interview

The technical round began with some general discussion about my background — my thesis, experience, career goals, and whether I was planning on pursuing higher studies.

Then came the coding task. They gave me a problem and told me to write the solution in my preferred language. I had to write code on pen and paper.

Convert a time string from 24-hour format to 12-hour format.

It was a simple problem, but I somehow messed it up. 😓 When they pointed out the mistake, I asked if I could try again. They handed back the paper, and I was able to fix it.

After that, they asked a few conceptual questions, including: DB transaction, Difference between symmetric and asymmetric key encryption, Linked List vs Array, RSA encryption etc.

Therap tends to ask similar questions every year, so knowing what to expect helps a lot. The entire interview was in Bangla, and lasted around 25–30 minutes.

HR Interview

This was more of a formality than a challenge. As far as I know, no one has ever been rejected at this stage. The HR round was conducted in English, and felt like a casual chat. The interviewer asked a few random questions and the conversation flowed naturally. The round wrapped up in about 15 minutes.

Got the job offer the same day in the afternoon 😃

Office location - Banani

Salary - 65k

---

Chaldal 🥚

Chaldal came to us for campus recruitment. Their hiring process includes an online assessment following 3-4 technical interviews.

Online Assessment

The first round was an online MCQ-based assessment, divided into three sections:

• Aptitude - 40 Questions, 20 Minutes

• Data Structures & Algorithms - 20 Questions, 10 Minutes

• Database - 10 Questions, 5 Minutes

The DSA section included typical questions on standard data structures, algorithm behavior, and time/space complexities. The DB section focused mainly on SQL queries. Time management is an important factor in this round.

Technical Interview - 1

The interviewer began by asking me to implement a linked list from scratch. After that, he gave me an interesting recursion/dp problem. I was given two strings and asked to align them by inserting dashes (-) in the appropriate places to show missing characters. For example, for the strings bbananana and banana, one valid output would be b-anana--. The task was to find all possible valid alignments like this.

Then we shifted gears into database design—he gave me a scenario involving products, warehouses, and employees. I had to design a relational schema with constraints, such as making sure an order only includes employees and products from the same warehouse.

This interview was about 30 minutes long. This interview was conducted in Bangla, but the rest were in English.

Technical Interview - 2

In my second interview the interviewer gave me two coding problems.

First one was very simple, just to get warmed up - reversing a string using recursion, and then checking whether a string is a palindrome using recursion.

The second was a scenario-based question where I had to implement a custom data structure—a linked list that supports operations like append, remove, swap, and shift.

He also asked my about my background, thesis, projects etc.

Technical Interview - 3

My third round was with Chaldal’s CTO. This round was short and focused—he gave me just one problem: Partition List. From what I have heard from my friends who had an interview with the CTO is that he gives a random problem of medium difficulty from Leetcode.

Technical Interview - 4 😑

After ONE MONTH! they called for another interview with one of their foreign engineers. He gave me a more implementation focused problem — a rolling ball simulation. I was given a grid where asterisks (*) represented solid ground and spaces ( ) were holes. The ball started at the top-left corner and had to reach the bottom-right. The task was to write a program that outputs all possible paths using directions like L, R, U, and D to guide the ball to its destination.

My final interviewer was surprised that that I was scheduled for another round after already speaking with the CTO. He gave me a thumbs up at the end and said things looked good from his side. But later, I was rejected with the reason that their “quota is full” 😑. It honestly felt like the fourth interview was just a formality—maybe even an excuse from management to quietly turn me down, who knows? In the end, it felt like a waste of time for both sides. Also, all the technical rounds were more or less the same in terms of content. That said, the interviewers—except the CTO—were actually quite supportive and friendly.

Office location : Banani

Salary : 3k/day for three months of probation period then 4k/day

---

Priyo 💳

Priyo also came for campus recruitment. They prioritize candidates with competitive programming background. The problem given in their technical round is typically harder than usual.

Technical Interview

The interview process at Priyo started with a technical round over Google Meet, and honestly, it was one of the most thorough technical interviews I’ve had. The session lasted about one hour and was conducted in Bangla. There were two interviewers.

The first part of the interview was a coding challenge. It began with a simple graph traversal problem:

Given a tree where each node has three pointers — left, right, and parent — find all nodes at a distance of k from a given node.

It was a classic DFS question. But that was just the beginning. What followed were 3–4 follow-up questions, each increasing the complexity of the original problem. I was able to handle most of them, but struggled with the last one. Throughout the problem-solving process, the interviewer emphasized time and space complexity at every step. I didn’t need to write any I/O code — just the core logic.

Among all the interviews I’ve faced up to this point, this one felt the most like a real technical interview. It had structure, depth, and thoughtful follow-ups. It almost felt like the kind of round you’d expect from companies like Google. One of the interviewer, from what I gathered, was probably preparing for (or attending) interviews at such places — and that reflected in how he conducted the session. (update: he got offer from Meta a week later)

In the second part of the round, the other interviewer shifted focus to my background — my projects, thesis, tech stack, and why I wanted to join Priyo. We discussed what tools I used and why I chose them.

Interview with the CEO

The second round was with the CEO — more of a behavioral interview.

He asked some basic and a few unexpected questions, and then gave an overview of Priyo’s work culture, the type of projects they handle, where the company is heading, and what it’s like to work there. This round was also in Bangla and lasted about one hour.

Both rounds went quite well from my perspective. Still, I ended up getting rejected.

Office location - Dhanmondi

Salary - ~100k

---

Canonical 💻

I applied through their website for the Python Engineer role. Canonical is infamous for having one of the worst recruitment process in the world. It contains several rounds and can take up to 2-3 months. First they ask to answer some written questions, then there are some assessments related to the role, then some early stage interviews, then some more interview :)

Written Interview !?!!

After a few days of applying they send me an email with 40 questions! covering my experience, education, interests, technical skills etc. It was very tedious but I went through it anyway,

Python Assesment

Next round was a python assessment which included some mcq questions and two coding tasks. The coding tasks were very easy. Only needed some if-else and for loop. The MCQs were a little tough for me. It included some advanced concepts like async io, pytest etc. Used chatgpt for some of them 😛

Psychometric Test

Then came a psychometric test full of abstract pattern recognition, box clicking, and IQ-style questions. It was a pretty useless round.

After that, they lined up three early stage interviews

Software Architecture & Engineering Skills Interview

In this round, the interviewer presented scenarios and asked how I’d approach them—project maintenance strategies, workflow comparisons like Agile vs. Waterfall, how I would choose a stack, questions about my open source contributions, my previous experiences, some questions about the projects I worked on etc. Some of the questions felt straight out of our engineering course.

Python Skills - Deep Dive interview

This wasn’t a coding interview, but a theory-heavy one. They asked a lot of detailed questions on Python — generators, OOP, multiprocessing, GIL, threading, data structures, and more. It was divided into five sections—Basic, Advanced, Systems, Testing & Debugging, and Web Development.

I had zero hands-on experience with testing tools or Python web frameworks, so I could not answer any questions from the last two parts :/ They asked questions related to pytest, django, flask etc.

Linux skills Interview

It included typical linux questions like hard link vs soft link, some linux command, threads and os related stuff, open source liscences etc. Google for linux interview questions, u’ll get some idea. I did a lot better in this round than the previous two.

The interviews felt robotic. It was like the interviews had a list of questions in front of them and they are asking form it one by one.

Were the Interviews hard? Not really. They were pretty simple. But I performed poorly because I did not anticipate these type of interview. Especially the first one. Most of the interviews I faced before in Bangladesh were mostly focused on problem solving. Also my spoken English let me down. I struggled to express my thoughts, especially in the first round. Even when I understood the concepts, I fumbled during explanations and gave brief, incomplete answers.

Anyway, after messing up the first interview, I knew I wouldn’t make it. Got the rejection letter two weeks later.

---

A Startup 💡

This was a startup led by some of our alumnus. They are currently in stealth mode so I'm not allowed to reveal much about them. They had posted a job circular in our CSE,BUET group, but I didn’t apply at first—I felt under-qualified since I lacked experience in some of the key technologies they listed. Later, when they were still looking for engineers, I applied and received an interview call through a referral.

Technical Interview - 1

The interviewer pulled up my resume and dove deep—asking A LOT of in-depth questions about the topics and technologies I had listed. It lasted about an hour and was almost entirely verbal. No algorithm problems, just one SQL query he asked me to write. He then explained the work culture of Shipday and asked if I am up for it. This round was conducted in Bangla.

Technical Interview - 2

The second interview was with two senior engineers. The first interviewer focused on database concepts, asking questions like when to use SQL vs. NoSQL, how indexing works, and the role of foreign keys and so on.

Then the second interviewer led a system design round. They asked me to design a delivery system with some requirements. It was my first time attempting system design. I panicked a bit and ended up drawing the system diagram using Microsoft Paint 😂. There were plenty of follow-up questions, and I struggled, but I learned a lot in that session. This round also lasted around 1 hour and was conducted in Bangla.

Calls with CEO and CTO

Next I got two calls from CEO and CTO both lasting around 20-30 minutes. These were mostly behavioral rounds. They were looking for long term engineers and I had to convince them that I would not go away.

The whole process was very fast, taking around 1 week.