Recruitment Stories - Pranjal's Experience at Therap (BD) Ltd.

Pranjal Kumar Nandi is currently working as an Associate Machine Learning Engineer at Therap (BD) Ltd. He has completed his Bachelor’s degree from the Department of Computer Science & Engineering, University of Dhaka. During his undergraduate years, Pranjal took part in several competitions. His team ‘Team Torimodosu’ was the champion of BRACathon 3.0 in the micro-finance category.

Pranjal applied to Therap through campus recruitment. He applied for both the Associate Software Engineer and Associate Machine Learning Engineer positions. However, he got called for the Associate Machine Learning Engineer role only. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, all the following recruitment phases happened online through Google Meet:

Phase 1

In this phase, the interviewers gave Pranjal a scenario on an image-based recommendation system and asked him to develop a machine learning system for this scenario from scratch. Afterward, they modified some of the facets of the scenario and asked Pranjal to explain how he would tweak his solution approach to come up with the best result. While Pranjal was explaining his solutions, the interviewers asked him related theoretical questions and the reasoning behind his answers. Also, the interviewers asked questions on several random machine learning topics.

This session lasted for about 25 minutes.

Phase 2

This was a coding assessment that lasted for about 30 minutes. The interviewers asked Pranjal to share his screen and to open Google Colab in the browser. Pranjal was allowed to use only Python to solve the programming problems. The interviewers gave him problems related to the topics - algorithms and data structures. The programming problems specifically required the knowledge of sorting, greedy approach, and string. As Pranjal solved a programming problem, the interviewers asked him about alternative approaches to solve the problem, and the time and space complexity of the solutions.

Phase 3

This was both a technical and a non-technical assessment. It lasted for about 20 minutes. Initially, the interviewers asked a few non-technical questions. Then, they gave Pranjal some real-life problems and asked him to solve those using data structures and algorithms. In particular, the interviewers wanted to hear the names of the specific algorithms or data structures Pranjal would use. Afterward, the interviewers asked several questions from Pranjal’s undergraduate courses.

Phase 4

This was a non-technical interview with the HR. It lasted for about 20 minutes. The interviewer asked Pranjal to tell something about himself, his education, his hobbies, and his career goals. Also, they discussed about social issues.

To prepare for all the technical assessments, Pranjal utilized the platforms - HackerRank and AlgoExpert. Also, he read several articles from GeeksforGeeks and some other blogs. Additionally, he completed courses on Machine Learning and Deep Learning by Andrew Ng from Coursera and read books on problem solving and machine learning.

Special thanks to Pranjal Kumar Nandi for taking out the time to share his recruitment experience with me. If you have any queries, feel free to contact him at pknandi130@gmail.com