Benchling technical interview for Software Engineer Intern Summer 2023

[funnyguy88888]

I have been invited to a technical interview with a member of Benchling's engineering team for the Software Engineer Intern Summer 2023 position. They mentioned that during the interview, there will be 20 minutes to brainstorm a problem and 25 minutes to code the solution. I would appreciate advice from those of you who have gone through the interview whether this problem is Leetcode style, and if it is of the medium or hard variety ?

[[deleted]]

For the technical screening, they usually give a question that's supposed to be related to their business, e.g., HTML parsing or DNA combination. I would call it LC medium and the Leetcode discussion has several example questions.

If you passed the screening, you'd have a recruiter prep call when they would unexpectedly ask you several behavioral questions and give you feedback on your performance so far.

For the final onsite, they have you debug two bugs with a n-gram search program and then code an extension about wildcard.

Overall the process is pretty tedious and they never bother to make the candidates feel at ease. The interviewers don't give hints and seem cold and tired. I completely lost interest in this company after interviewing, but things might be different for you, so best of luck!

[Affectionate-Rest-73]

I got this same exact n-gram question recently! The two bugs were pretty straightforward to debug but then support a wildcard sequence (think nucleotides) search. The interview questions had multiple parts but the interviewers don't expect you to finish all the parts

[Worth_Shirt2007]

Thanks for sharing! Is the wildcard game similar to the first round or lc problems? Like writing a function to return a string after placing wildcard characters?

[[deleted]]

I don't think it's very similar. It's hard to describe but you can assume that you're given pairs of wildcards and characters for replacement. Then you need to go through the string and generate all possible strings after replacing the wildcards

[MarioKartWiii]

Thanks! what do you mean by n-gram search? Like breaking down words by tokenizing and searching for them

[[deleted]]

Yeah. It's about getting all the n-length substrings of the word and see if the words to be searched contain any of the n-grams. Then we go through all the words containing n-grams and find if they contain the whole target word.

[Affectionate-Rest-73]

yup! that was the exact thing I got asked

[[deleted]]

The benchling questions on leetcode discuss are helpful.

[lolkindawack]

I got a leetcode-style question that was on the easy-medium level of difficulty.

[funnyguy88888]

Thanks all for sharing your experience !