Shopee | Singapore | May 2021 [Offer]
Interview Experience
3YoE Date: 27 April, 2021
1. Recruiter Screening : 1. Why do you want to switch from the current company 2. Expected salary and what should be your expectation 2. Onsite 1 : ...
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3YoE
Date: 27 April, 2021
1. Recruiter Screening :
1. Why do you want to switch from the current company
2. Expected salary and what should be your expectation
2. Onsite 1 :
1. String S1 and S2, get all substrings of S1 that are permutations of S2
2. What is the drawback of indexing
3. What is the importance of ordering in the indexing of multiple columns
4. If the network is more congested, then which applications you suspect TCP or UDP
5. Difference between connection less and connection oriented (get ack in connection and no ack in connection less)
6. There is some timeout in case of TCP I.e. network_not rest etc
3. Onsite 2 :
1. Implement set by just using array / stack / queue (add, delete, contains, union)
2. Print any of the longest increasing subsequence
3. What is the use of volatile keyword
4. What are the various transaction isolation levels while using mysql innodb storage (READ_COMMITTED, READ_UNCOMMITTED, SERIALIZABLE)
5. How the TCP connection and disconnection happens (what is sent back and forth as a part of TCP 3 way handshake)
6. Design tiny URL
7. Explain how hashmap works internally, what is Balanced binary search tree and give some examples and also properties of redblack tree (properties)
4. Onsite 3:
1. Caching bottle necks and how to resolve in horizontally scaled
2. Pass by value and pass by reference and what is default imple java, c, python
3. Notify, wait , sync block \u2014> multithreading
About This Question
This is a candidate experience report from a shopee interview for a swe role during the recruiter round reported in 2021.
It covers the following topics: Arrays, Binary Search, Binary Tree, Dynamic Programming, Hash Table, Queue, Stack, Strings, System Design .
Topics
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About Shopee Interview Reports
This question was reported by a candidate who interviewed at Shopee. LeakCode aggregates interview reports from 10+ sources, including 1Point3Acres, Glassdoor, LeetCode Discuss, Blind, Reddit, Indeed, and Nowcoder. Each report is translated where necessary, deduplicated against existing entries, and tagged by company, role, round type, and reporting date.
Use this question as one calibration data point, not a memorization target. Companies typically rotate their question pools every 2-4 months; the exact wording of a 2024 question may differ from what you encounter today. The underlying pattern, difficulty level, and follow-up depth at Shopee are the higher-signal extractions to take from this report.
For broader preparation context, the Shopee interview process typically includes a recruiter screen, one or two technical phone screens, and a 4-5 round on-site loop covering coding, system design (at L4+ levels), and behavioral. Reports tagged on LeakCode show the round-by-round distribution and typical difficulty calibration. To browse questions filtered by round type and seniority, use the company hub linked above.
How To Practice This Type of Question
Solve similar problems on LeetCode under timed conditions (25-35 minutes per medium difficulty). The goal is pattern recognition: recognize the underlying technique (sliding window, two-pointer, BFS, memoized recursion, etc.) within 60-90 seconds of reading. Strong candidates verbalize their hypothesis out loud before coding, then iterate based on feedback. Weak candidates dive into implementation immediately, lose time on the wrong approach, and run out of time for follow-ups.
Companies update their question pools every 2-4 months. The exact wording of any given question may have been retired by the time you interview. Focus your prep on the pattern, not the specific problem. The patterns that appear in Shopee reports consistently are the ones worth investing in; one-off niche problems are not.
During Your Shopee Round
Apply the standard interview round template: clarify requirements (2-3 minutes), state your approach out loud and confirm direction with the interviewer (3-5 minutes), code with narration (15-25 minutes), test with concrete examples including edge cases (5 minutes), discuss optimization or trade-offs if time permits (5 minutes). This template is universally accepted across FAANG and adjacent companies; deviating from it produces weaker interviewer feedback signal.
The single most predictive failure mode in Shopee reports tagged "no hire": not asking clarifying questions. Interviewers are explicitly trained to weight this. Strong candidates ask 3-5 clarifying questions even on problems that look obvious; weak candidates dive into code immediately. The clarifying-question check is often the first signal recorded in the interviewer's written notes.