Compass | Phone Screen | Karat
Question Details
Today, I had my Phone Screen round for Compass on Karat platform. The interview was for 60 min. In the first few minutes, the interviewer introduced himself and explained me...
Full Details
Today, I had my Phone Screen round for Compass on Karat platform.
The interview was for 60 min. In the first few minutes, the interviewer introduced himself and explained me the format of the interview.
Format
- Introduction: 1 min
- Tech Questions: Interviewer gave me a set of 4 topics out of which I had to choose 2. The interviewer would ask me 3-4 questions on those 2 topics for the next 10 min.
Coding Next 45 min would be spent on the coding questions. If I was able to solve the 1st question within time, the interviewer would proceed to the next question.
Tech Topics
- Productions issues debugging
- Object Oriented Design
- Test cases and patterns
- Computer Fundamentals
I chose topic #1 and #2.
Questions under #1
- I was given a CPU and RAM usage graph of a process and was asked to debug if there\'s any issue and what that issue could be and how would I solve that. I observed that the CPU was constant but the RAM was increasing linearly. I told that there could be some memory leak in the process. It could be because of resource not closed properly and hence the GC was not able to clear them. I told that I would capture the heap dump to analyse further.
- There is a multi threaded application which is seeing that the threads are not sufficient. I was asked how would I debug this? I said that I would capture a thread dump to see if the threads are blocked on some operations or if there\'s a deadlock scenario.
- There\'s a service which is handle 1 RPS traffic. How would I find out if the service can handle 1000 RPS? I said that I would take a host which has the same specs of the hosts in production and use a load generating tool like jmeter and stress out the host to see the maximum requests it could handle per second with in the thresholds of CPU and RAM. I would take that number and multiple with the total number of hosts available in Prod to find out the scale in Prod.
Questions under #2
What is the difference between composition and inheritance. Can you state some usecase where you use them?
Coding Question #1
Given a list of words and a string, find the word whose anagram is present in the given string.
Example:
Words: ["cat", "baby", "bird", "fruit"]
String1: "tacjbcebef"
Answer: "cat"
String2: "bacdrigb"
Answer: "bird"
Coding Question #2
Given a grid of characters and a string, find the path of the string in the grid. You can only traverse to the right or bottom.
This was similar to word search problem on leetcode but slightly easier w.r.t traversal as its just 2 directions thus eliminating the case of reusing the characters. Also, we have to return the path instead of a boolean.
Overall
Overall the interview went well, the interviewer was very friendly and the karat code studio was good with auto fill-in and suggestions.
About This Question
This is a reported interview question from a compass interview for a swe role during the oa round reported in 2021.
It covers the following topics: Graph, Strings, Os, Concurrency, Oop, Backtracking, Heap, Matrix .
Topics
About Compass Interview Reports
This question was reported by a candidate who interviewed at Compass. 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 Compass are the higher-signal extractions to take from this report.
For broader preparation context, the Compass 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 Compass reports consistently are the ones worth investing in; one-off niche problems are not.
During Your Compass 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 Compass 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.