Walmart Inc., one of the world's largest retailers, employs over 2.2 million people. As a member of their engineering team, you will be in charge of the operations of such a large company.
Walmart Software Engineers' interview process is divided into three stages: online assessment, technical interview rounds, and HR rounds. You'll need to prepare for Walmart software engineer interview questions to ace the interview, and we're here to help.
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To give you a better understanding of the kinds of Walmart software engineer interview questions you can expect, in this article, we’ll cover:
- Walmart Software Engineer Interview Process
- Walmart Software Engineer Interview Questions for Freshers
- Walmart Software Engineer Interview Questions for Experienced Professionals
- Walmart Software Engineer Interview Questions for HR Rounds
- FAQs on Walmart Software Engineer Interview Questions
Walmart Software Engineer Interview Process
Walmart has a thorough hiring process in place because many of the company's technological initiatives have been coded in the open and distributed as open-source software.
The Walmart software engineer interview process consists of these three rounds:
- Online Assessment
- Technical Rounds
- HR Rounds
Online Assessment
The first part of the interview process is the online assessment. If you clear it, you’ll be invited for the technical interviews. It typically lasts around 90 minutes and consists of about 10 MCQs. You can expect questions based on CS fundamentals such as Object-Oriented Programming, Computer Networks, and Operating Systems.
You’ll also have to solve three coding questions. The difficulty level of these questions will be from easy to medium to medium-hard. When practicing Walmart software engineer questions for this part, prepare questions on CS fundamentals and coding to qualify for the next round.
Technical Rounds
In this part, the interviewer will test your technical skills and knowledge. The face-to-face technical round is the most important part of the process, and candidates are often asked questions based on their resumes and areas of interest.
When preparing Walmart software engineer interview questions for this round, you’ll need:
- Good knowledge of at least one programming language
- In-depth understanding of CS fundamentals
- System design knowledge
- Awareness of the latest technologies
- Prepare questions on a field that’s related to the job you’re applying for
Apart from this, you can also expect questions based on the projects you have worked on in the past and how you were involved in them. There will be three rounds of technical interviews, but the number can change based on your performance in the first round.
HR Round
As is the norm, the HR rounds are conducted to ensure that you’re a cultural fit for the company. To nail these interviews, you’ll need to express your desire to join Walmart. You can also be asked Walmart software engineer interview questions based on the company’s history, values, goals, and objectives.
Don’t make the mistake of underestimating this round because this might just lead to you not getting hired. Keep in mind that even your physical presence, how you behave, and your attitude throughout will be monitored.
So be pleasant, cordial, and prepared to face puzzle-based questions that’ll test your overall intelligence and ability to adapt to challenging situations.
For more information about the process, read Walmart Interview Process for Software Engineers.
Walmart Software Engineer Interview Questions for Freshers
Here are some Walmart software engineer interview questions and answers for freshers to help kickstart your prep:
1. Differentiate between the programming languages: C and C++.
2. How can memory leaks be avoided?
A memory leak is created when programmers develop a heap memory and then don’t destroy it. As a result of this memory leak, the computer’s performance suffers since the usable memory is decreased.
The worst-case scenario is that a lot of the memory that’s available may be allocated and cause all or part of the system to stop working properly. These leaks can be problematic when it comes to applications such as daemons and servers that, by definition, are never terminated.
To avoid memory leaks, it's always advised to destroy heap memory when it's not required.
Sample Walmart Software Engineer Interview Questions for Freshers:
- What do you know about software deployment?
- How would you define the local variable and the instance variable?
- Given an SQL table that has names of employees and their salaries as an entry in each tuple. Find the employees who have the second highest salary.
- In the context of Operating Systems, how would you differentiate between process and thread?
- Define multi-threading.
- What is meant by preprocessors in the context of C programming language? What are the different kinds of preprocessor directives?
- What is meant by primary key and super key in terms of DBMS?
- What processes are triggered when we type an URL into a browser and hit enter?
- How would you differentiate between Java and C++?
- What are wild pointers, and how can they be avoided?
Do you want to know how much a Walmart SWE earns? Read our blog on Walmart Software Engineer Salary in the US to learn about the compensation package and job perks.
Walmart Software Engineer Interview Questions for Experienced Professionals
Here are some advanced Walmart interview questions for senior software engineers with answers:
1. What is meant by candidate key and foreign key?
Candidate key: A candidate key is a particular attribute or group of attributes that uniquely identify a tuple in a way that no subset can uniquely identify a tuple. A candidate key can also be known as a subset of super keys. Out of all the candidate keys, a key is selected and called the primary key.
Foreign key: A foreign key is a column in a table that indicates the primary key of another table. For instance, in a company, each employee is given a specific department, and a department and an employee are two separate entities. So, the department’s information can’t be kept in the personnel table, which is why the primary key of one table is used to join or relate these two tables.
2. What are the advantages of multithreading over multiprocessing?
Some advantages of multithreading are:
- Improved responsiveness: Helps in increasing the responsiveness in the system as there are several threads, and even if some of these get blocked, the others might continue their execution.
- Reduced switch context time: When it comes to threads, context switching is faster as these threads have the same data and code. The only differentiating factor for each thread is the stacks.
- Better communication: As all the threads are present in just a single process, the communication among the threads is much easier as compared to that of processes.
Sample Walmart Interview Questions for Senior Software Engineers
- Define custom annotation.
- Out of multiple threads, if a thread throws a Run time exception, what happens to other threads?
- How would you explain the Java memory model?
- Differentiate between Hash Map and Tree Map.
- Given a node, how would you find the number of leaf nodes?
- How has Linkedin designed the number of hops to get connected to other people?
- What is the number of possibilities to move from one point to another point in a chess board kind of square box?
- Remove spaces in a string without using the inbuilt function and taking constant space.
- Explain the one important advantage of auto boxing.
- How would you explain the Concurrent hash map?
Here are some more Walmart Interview Questions and Answers to help you prepare for your upcoming interview.
Walmart Software Engineer Interview Questions for HR Rounds
Some sample Walmart interview questions for software engineers that are asked in HR rounds are:
- Why do you want to work at Walmart?
- What, according to you, are your strengths and weaknesses?
- Is it possible for you to relocate to a different part of the country?
- How would you describe yourself? Make sure to include who you are and what you think about yourself.
- What about Walmart interests you the most?
- Why are you the perfect fit for this position?
- Describe your final year project in detail. What innovative ideas did you offer to this project?
- List some things about this career that you find appealing.
- According to you, which values would you bring to Walmart?
- While working here, how do you plan on making a difference in the world?
Here are some useful resources that’ll help you prepare better for behavioral rounds:
- 10 Key Behavioral Skills Required to Land a $500k Tech Job
- How to Prepare for Behavioral Rounds at FAANG+ Tech Interviews
On a conclusive note, remember to brush up on your CS fundamentals, thoroughly practice coding, and ensure that you research the role and the company as well as you can. Therefore, when preparing your strategy, include Walmart software engineer interview questions based on these topics.
FAQs on Walmart Software Engineer Interview Questions
Q1. Is it difficult to crack Walmart interview?
While it is not as hard as cracking the tech interviews at FAANG, it’s not easy as well. Just remember to go over the given topics and practice your coding. If you prepare well, you can easily pass the interview.
Q2. What questions do they ask at the Walmart interview?
Some questions you can expect in the interview are — Why are you the perfect fit for this position? Why do you want to work at Walmart? If there was a time crunch, how would you ensure that the quality of your work doesn’t suffer?
Q3. What do software engineers at Walmart do?
As a software engineer at Walmart, you’ll be responsible for technical discovery, design, and implement large-scale applications, products, and platforms. You’ll be working with and reporting to the manager of software engineering.
Q4. How to prepare for a Walmart interview?
The first thing to do is to research the role as thoroughly as you can. Make sure that you study the core values of Walmart, prepare CS fundamentals, practice coding, and don’t forget to prepare for the HR rounds.
Q5. What’s the salary of a senior software engineer at Walmart?
As per Indeed.com, a senior software engineer at Walmart makes around $126,386 per year on average.
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