In this article I am going to share my entire interview experience with Salesforce Hyderabad and how I got the offer as MTS in Salesforce.

Application process:

I used to check the career portal of Salesforce on certain interval and found out that they have openings for MTS role (equivalent to SDE 2) in Hyderabad location during June, 2025. I directly applied for the position from the career portal. Few days post that one of the recruiters (Syed Rahman) reached out to me via call and asked me to share a few details like my total years of experience, the tech stacks I have worked on, etc. He shared an online HackerRank test link and asked me to complete it as soon as possible. He mentioned once I clear the test, they will call me for a hiring drive.

Online (HackerRank) test:

The HackerRank test was of 1 hour 30 minutes duration and consisted of two medium level DSA questions. They were as follows

1. Given two string X and Y of length N and M respectively. The task is to find the length of the longest subsequence of string X which is a substring in sequence Y.
   Practise link: https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/problems/find-length-of-longest-subsequence4905/1
2. I can’t clearly remember the 2nd question but it was a medium level question on arrays.

I solved both of the questions on time and was able to pass all the test cases. After one week, the recruiter called me and informed that I have cleared the online assessment and told that they are conducting a hiring drive (exactly 2 weeks later) and it will be a virtual drive. But few days before the actual drive, the recruiter mentioned that the hiring has been put on hold and they will ping once it’s resumed. After that, the recruiter has reached out to me multiple times to check my availability for the interviews but every time due to some personal work , I couldn’t commit to the dates, they were mentioning. After a lots of iteration, finally I accepted the interview invitation for the hiring drive. As it was a hiring drive, the recruitment team wanted to conduct all the rounds except the hiring manager round on the same day and they informed me to prepare for both the rounds.

1st DSA round:

At around 10:00 a.m. sharp the interview started. The interviewer was very friendly and introduced himself. He initially mentioned about the his background in brief. I also put a short introduction about myself and post that the actual interview got started. He shared the online HackerRank code pair link and pasted the first question on the editor. The questions were as follows

1. Given the root of a binary tree and an integer targetSum, return all root-to-leaf paths where the sum of the node values in the path equals targetSum. Each path should be returned as a list of the node values, not node references.
   Practise link: https://leetcode.com/problems/path-sum-ii/description/
   Since there was no boiler plate code, I had define the tree node structure and classes from scratch.
2. You are a professional robber planning to rob houses along a street. Each house has a certain amount of money stashed. All houses at this place are arranged in a circle. That means the first house is the neighbour of the last one. Meanwhile, adjacent houses have a security system connected, and it will automatically contact the police if two adjacent houses were broken into on the same night.
   Practise link: https://leetcode.com/problems/house-robber-ii/description/

For both of the questions I explained my approach first and also explained how and why that works. For example in the 2nd question, I started with the pick and don’t pick concept that we follow in such standard (like house robber 1) problems and since it’s circular array, we definitely can’t take the first and last element simultaneously. So the problem has to broken down to application of pick and don’t pick concept for two segments i.e. [0…(n-2)] and [1…(n-1)] of the array.

The interview was satisfied with the approach and asked me to code up the implementation for it. I ran the code for a couple of test cases and it was working fine. At the end we discussed about the time and space complexities of the approaches. Then he gave me opportunity to ask him if I have any questions ready for him. I wanted to know if that hiring was going on for a specific team or it was a generic hiring. He mentioned that this hiring is being conducted for the commerce cloud of Salesforce (a business unit). I then asked him about the kind of work and the business aspects of it. He added that this org basically focuses on building platforms through which other consumers can set up business online according their need. After the questionaries the round finally ended.

Although the 2nd round was supposed to happen on the same day, due to some network issues, they faced lots of challenges to accommodate all the candidates and some other recruiter mentioned that I have cleared the first round and they will let me know about the further interview details.

2nd DSA round:

Few days after the first round, I received the interview invitation for the 2nd round. Although I expected this round would be a LLD round (as the recruited have informed beforehand), it finally turned out to be a DSA round again. This time the interviewer seemed to be in a hurry. Within a single statement she finished her introduction and I also didn’t mention much about my background since I though we should save time for the actual discussion. She shared the HackerRank code pair link and pasted the question in the editor. Through out the round, we discussed about only one DSA question and that was as follows.

1. Given the head of a linked list, reverse the nodes of the list k at a time, and return the modified list.
   Practise link: https://leetcode.com/problems/reverse-nodes-in-k-group/description/

First of all, I explained my recursive approach properly and she asked me the the time and space complexities for it. She was actually not ok with the recursive stack space but told me to code it up. Within 10–15 minutes I finished writing the code for the recursive approach. She asked me to run the code against a couple of test cases she gave. It was working fine only. But now comes the interesting part. She told me to cut down the recursive stack space and come up with iterative solution for it. Initially it was bit tricky for me but I communicated with her regarding whatever thought was going on my mind. I implemented the iterative approach in small steps. During that I messed up in joining a segment to the part before it (reversal may or may not happen) to some extent but I took some time to debug and figured out the issues in my code. The interviewer was friendly and also helped me a bit in debugging. Finally the I corrected my code and it was able to pass all the test cases she had with her. Now it was the most optimised approach for the problem so she was satisfied.

That’s how the 2nd round ended.

3rd round (Hiring Manager Round):

Few days after the 2nd round, one new recruiter from Salesforce called me and informed that I have cleared the last round and they want to call me for an in person interview with one of the directors of commerce cloud at Salesforce. But he mentioned that since the interviewer was on leave for that week, they will call me for next week. I was actually on a vacation at Bangalore so anyhow attending the interview on that week was not possible. 🙃

So next week Thursday my interview got scheduled. Salesforce Hyderabad office is only around 2kms from my accommodation so I thought I will reach there within 15–20 minutes. So I left a bit late but unfortunately on that day traffic was pathetic and I needed to take different route to reach Salesforce office. When I reached there, I was sweating like hell and became bit tensed since I reached a bit late. But the assistant there was really well behaved and gave me time to fresh up and come to the room. She called the hiring manager and then the interview started.

The interviewer was a director and he is working with Salesforce for almost 15 years. He started to scan my resume and just to make me comfortable he started to share how engineering entrance exams were conducted at his time (since he saw I am a graduate from NIT Rourkela) and how the system has changed now. Then he opened my LeetCode profile and was navigating through the stats there. He suddenly asked me what LeetCode is and what’s the significance of the stats in my profile. I was really amazed to listen to such question that too from an experience director. He praised about my stats and after some casual talks he started to ask technical question.

He wanted me to explain the most critical, technically heavy challenge that I have faced so far in my entire journey and how I have dealt with it. So I was working on disaster recovery support for deployment (I am part of the CD team at my current company) and discussed several aspects of it.

The first question he asked me was,

Two algebraic polynomials (eg a*x^n + b*x^(n-1) + c*x^(n-3) + …) will given. I need to come up with a function that will take the polynomials as input and generate the sum of them.

How I will take the inputs was upto me. So I started with taking the polynomials as string. The core logic here was to

1. Split each polynomial at every operator (+/-)
2. Collect the operands in an array.
3. Identify the highest and lowest powers of variable.
4. Create an array in the corresponding range to hold the coefficients of the sum.
5. Finally add the operands of the polynomials and fill the resultant array and construct the result string.

Almost for 20 minutes I discussed about my approach on white board. Then he asked me about one system design question.

Design the authentication system of a social networking site.

Here I discussed about the following components of the system.

1. The models and database schema.
2. How I will store the password and other sensitive informations.
3. How I will scale it and make it reliable.

After that there were lots of behavioural questions like

1. Why Salesforce. Why not other companies.
2. What I want to achieve in long run.

I also asked him couple of questions like

1. What is the expectations here from a MTS.
2. The business aspects of the commerce cloud since it’s a B2B segment of Salesforce.

Finally the interview ended on a good note. 😇

After almost 2 weeks, the recruiter called me and shared the good news that I have finally cleared all the rounds by God’s grace (الحمد لله على كل شيء) and he will roll out the offer soon. 😊

I couldn’t negotiate much on salary and also had a chance to connect with the VP of the org later to discuss about some of the questions I had. Their offer was really good and lucrative but I didn’t accept their offer since I have already accepted offer from Microsoft. Overall it was a really nice experience with Salesforce.

Written by Imran Wahid