Interview Experience: Backend Engineering Internship at Fyle
Interview Experience: Backend Engineering Internship at Fyle
Hello, I am Roshan Mhatre, a 4th-year IT undergrad from VIT Bombay and a computer geek. I recently joined Fyle as a Backend Engineering Intern.
Do you wanna know the secret to join Fyle as an intern?
Yes! Then let’s go.
Applying
It was July 2022 when I finished my internship at a previous startup. I was looking for a new internship at a mid-sized company in full-stack / backend engineering roles through Internshala(I have used it before).
Luckily, I found out about an opening at Fyle, and after quick research, I found that Fyle is an expense management startup growing fast, so I applied with my resume and a note explaining why they should hire me.
I was not sure as there were already 200+ applicants for the internship. But, to my surprise, I got a reply from them just the next day. It had a take-home assignment with a deadline of 18 days.
The Assignment
They sent me a link to a GitHub repository having a Flask-based assignment and the problem statement. It also had the features listed down that I had to implement in the application.
When I ran the initial server on my machine to test the application, it threw some errors. The errors were around some libraries that only ran in Linux-based systems; I had Windows :(
I did not give up. Fortunately, I knew about Docker, a software platform that uses OS-level virtualization. In simple words, I could use Linux on my Windows machine ;).
I spent some time understanding the application. I quickly implemented the features in Python and tested them, dockerized the whole application, and wrote a good README and steps to run the dockerized app.
Only a few people care about writing good documentation, writing a good README showed Fyle that I was one of them.
I cleaned the entire code and added a few comments to improve the code. Again, this shows how much you focus on writing clean code.
I submitted the project the next day and hoped for the best.
The Interview
I got a mail from one of the Engineering managers from Fyle the day after submission asking to set up a technical interview at a suitable time using calendly. It got scheduled for 8th August 2022.
There were two interviewers, an Engineering manager and a Senior Engineer from the team. The interview started with a greeting and introduction from both sides. Then they gave me the background of the company and what it does. The Senior engineer said - "We were quite impressed by your submission"; I felt relaxed to hear those words.
We then opened my submission, going through each line of code, and discussed what they liked and what could be improved. Then we continued with my resume and talked about my previous internships and projects. I was given different scenarios and asked how will I handle them, which led to quite a healthy discussion.
The interview was supposed to be for 30mins, but it went till 60mins. We spent the last 5 minutes discussing the internship requirements and some questions I had for them.
This interview was better than the other interviews I had because it felt like we were together discussing a problem and coming up with a solution rather than just asking me.
After the interview, I felt I had a good chance of getting the offer.
Offer Letter
One hour later, I got a call from the manager stating - Hey Roshan, we want to offer you the internship!
I was very happy with tears in my eyes.
It was an amazing feeling 🥳.
Timeline
1st August 2022 - Applied on Internshala
2nd August 2022 - Got assignment/challenge
3rd August 2022 - Sent the submission
4th August 2022 - Mail to schedule interview
8th August 2022 - Interview
8th August 2022 - Got the offer
24th August 2022 - Started my internship
Some Tips and Resources:
The most important tip I'd give is to focus on the challenge. Try to solve it to the best of your abilities.
Fyle highly cares about the quality of your work, so this is your chance to show them you have what it takes.
Some resources that helped me with the challenge:
Python:
Clean Code -