Introduction

In this article, I am going to discuss the round by round selection process for Seclore. The role offered by the company was ‘Trainee Product Engineer’.

About Seclore

Seclore Technology is a Mumbai-based security software company incubated by the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Bombay. According to Seclore’s corporate website, its security solutions focus on information usage control, information rights management (IRM) and secure outsourcing.

We are global leaders in the Data-Centric Security space. Right from protecting nuclear submarine designs to new drug formulations to customer data of Fortune 100 organizations — we guard every kind of confidential information.

About responsibilities

• You will be part of the core product development team that is responsible for building different components of the Seclore products.
• You will be responsible for designing, coding, reviewing, testing, bug-fixing different modules of the software product that needs to work seamlessly across different customer environments.
• We are looking for a coding enthusiast who loves working with code and developing software systems.
• This is an excellent opportunity for young passionate developers to start their career on a strong platform with a world-class product development experience and deep understanding into various cutting-edge technologies J2EE / Encryption / XML / LDAP/Databases/ Internationalization etc.

Rounds

1. Objective Aptitude Test
2. Programming Test
3. 1st level technical interview
4. Final Technical Interview

Round 1: Objective Aptitude Test

Duration: 30 mins
There will be 16 multiple choice questions and it is based on basic maths and logic. For every correct answer, you get +1 and for every wrong answer, -0.5 will be deducted from your total score. Note that the camera should be on throughout the test and navigating away from the test screen will shut your test.
 

Round 2: Programming Test

Duration: 60 minutes
This round was quite different from what usually coding rounds look like. They had given a Binary Search Tree code with various common functions like inserting, deleting, searching node, etc. Also, there were various anonymous non-common functions whose working we had to understand and write about on the answer sheet. There were 5 such questions. Some of the anonymous functions I remember are as following: 
1. Calculated sum of leaf nodes of a particular root node.
2. Counting depth of the binary tree in reverse order.
3. Function related to swapping/rotating tree. 
4. Applying swapping of right and left subtree recursively.
5. Finding the path of nodes whose sum equals the input number.

Round 3: 1st level technical interview

Duration: 60 minutes
The main focus of the interview was on the resume, puzzles, and projects. 

1. The interviewer asked me to explain one of my major projects. Apart from the basic questions about the project, he went into detail about every aspect of the project like load balancing, ngnix, hosting, tech stack, etc. This completely depends on your project and what you say about it. The only advice for project-related questions is to know your project in great detail. 
2. The interviewer gave me various puzzles where I think the main motive was not to test if I get the answers, but was to understand how the candidate approaches a problem and the thought process behind every approach. 

Round 4: Final Technical Interview

Duration: 60 minutes
This is similar to Round 3 with the difference that the interviewer is was among the top people of the company. In my case, it was the Vice President of the company. Along with a lot of technical questions, significant emphasis was given to internships. The interviewer also asked questions to know my understanding of business and what kind of person I am as a whole. Note that there were no direct data structures and algorithms questions asked during this interview but I had to use DSA to solve the puzzles.