SAP Labs Interview Experience @ UVCE | Gautham Sutrave (Batch '26)

SAP Labs recently visited the UVCE campus for recruitment, conducting a rigorous process consisting of five elimination rounds. Below is a detailed breakdown of my experience.

The Recruitment Process Overview

The SAP Labs recruitment drive was divided into five distinct stages:

1. Online Assessment
2. Technical Interview 1
3. Technical Interview 2
4. Techno-Managerial Round
5. HR Round

Note: All the rounds following the online assessment were conducted on the college campus. Every round was an elimination round, and the final results were announced on the same day.

1. Online Assessment

It was conducted online. There were two DSA (Data Structures and Algorithms) questions to solve in this round: one was easy, and the other was a medium-level question.

We were given a time limit of 1 hour 30 minutes to solve the problems, and we had to meticulously consider all edge cases before submitting the code.

2. Technical Interview 1

The interviewer started off with a brief introduction and asked me to introduce myself.

I was asked about the certifications mentioned in my resume. Following that, I was questioned on my listed projects. Since it was a team-specific hiring process where the interviewer was looking for candidates according to their specific requirements (Cloud Native Developer), they delved deep into the project where I had mentioned using Cloud Native services.

The questions about the cloud started from the basics and extended to an intermediate level. I was also asked about the architectural implementation of the cloud-native service in my project and the major operational issues I faced while doing so.

Coding Challenge: OOPs & DSA

Next, I was asked to develop an OOPs (Object-Oriented Programming) program from scratch for a Vehicle Parking System. Initially, I struggled with the optimal approach, but moving forward, we had a collaborative discussion about the solution architecture.

As time was running out, I was asked one last DSA question: Given an array of 0s and 1s in random order, move all the 0s to the beginning. I provided the brute-force approach and a slightly better approach. While I tried to optimize it fully, I could not complete the optimal O(N) solution in time.

This interview went on for about 1 hour.

3. Technical Interview 2

Here, I was questioned about the Vehicle Parking System again, but this time in much greater depth. The interviewer wanted me to design a database schema and write a program solving the problem using the database created with OOPs concepts.

He wanted me to make logical assumptions, note them down on paper, and explicitly explain my step-by-step approach. At each step, I was questioned and cross-questioned. I was imposed with a lot of changing constraints throughout and asked to update my solution dynamically; this actually helped me understand the problem statement more clearly.

Though I could not solve it completely, I communicated my thought process. The interviewer was highly supportive, guiding me through the problem and giving inputs on how to approach such real-life system design statements.

Project Deep Dive: Machine Learning

Moving on, he asked about my projects in complete detail. He picked my ML (Machine Learning) project and asked me to explain:

• The inputs taken to train the model.
• The exact business logic of what the model does.
• The complete working pipeline of the model along with the underlying algorithms used.

This round lasted for about 1 hour and was mainly focused on solving a real-world problem from scratch, testing database relations and working code.

4. Techno-Managerial Round

The interview started off with a brief introduction followed by a complex data-handling problem statement:

"There are three colleges—say 1, 2, and 3. Each college provides me the data of employees which have 10 consistent attributes, but each college gives the data in different formats (XML, CSV, and JSON). Design a system to receive this data consistently and store it in a database of your choice, irrespective of the incoming format."

At each step of my approach, I was questioned, and they added new constraints—such as, "What if there is another college with a different format, say plain text? How would you make changes to your system architecture then?"

Situational Questions

They also asked me behavioral and situational questions:

• If I was given the role of a Quality Assurance Tester, would I take it?
• There might not be any work related to AI or ML (my primary interest)—would I still give my best in such a role?
• Would I be open to working on weekends if a deployment required it?

This round lasted for about 30 minutes.

5. HR Round

The final interview started with a brief introduction followed by standard HR questions:

• Why did you choose AIML as your specialization?
• What if we give you a role which does not involve anything related to AIML?
• What are the core challenges you faced during your hackathons and coding competitions, and how did you overcome them?
• What challenges did you face during your college life, and what did you learn from them?
• Why do you want to join SAP Labs?

This round lasted for around 15-20 minutes.

Tips for Juniors

All the best for your prep, and don’t forget to have fun while learning!

Fresher’s Corner: What do these words mean?

If you are in your 1st or 2nd year, some terms in this interview experience might be new to you. Here is a quick breakdown to help you prepare: