IBM India Interview Experience for SDE

IBM India visited our campus for a campus recruitment drive in the month of September 2025, and I am sharing my interview experience with the company below.

Overview

1. Online Assessment
2. Technical Interview Round
3. Managerial Interview Round

Online Assessment

The Online Assessment was conducted virtually on HackerRank, and it consisted of two coding questions. Both were very easy questions. One of them was an anagram-based question, and the other one was to be solved using a priority queue.

Technical Interview Round

The first round of interview was conducted in person and I have mentioned the questions I was asked below, categorized based on the subject.

Resume

1. What is RAG?

C++

1. What is shallow copy and deep copy?
2. What is the "virtual" keyword?
3. What is v-table?

OOPS

1. For runtime polymorphism, what else is necessary, other than the function to be virtual?

OOAD

1. Explain the SOLID principles.

Coding

1. Given a string for example, "abbcddeee", output "ab2cd2e3" given that all similar characters are adjacent and the order of characters in output is same as in the input string.
2. Leetcode 198

General

1. Do you have any experience where you had to learn some new technology/tech stack within a limited time frame?

Puzzles

1. Given a rope that burns out in 1 hour, how will you measure 45 min using it?
2. What is the minimum number of cuts required to cut a cake into 8 equal parts? (Ans: 3)

After the first round, I was selected for the next round.

Managerial Interview Round

The second round was also conducted in person and the following are the questions that I was asked:

1. Given 12 coins (11 real and 1 fake) with the fake coin weighing lesser than the real coins, what is the minimum number of times you have to weigh to find the fake coin? (Answer: 3)
2. Given a very long URL, how will you provide a shortened URL to the customer that maps to the long URL? (Expected Answer: Hash Table)
3. What is your favorite subject? (Because I answered DBMS) What DBMSes are you aware of? (Because I answered that I have hands on experience with Neo4j, MongoDB and MYSQL) What is the difference between Neo4j and MySQL and when will you use each of them?
4. Explain your favorite project.
5. What job are you expecting to do at IBM?

Few days later, IBM released the offer list and I am happy to tell that I was one of the offered students :)

Hope my experience will help and All the best!