Interviewing with Hummingwave Technologies for a Software Development Engineer (SDE) position was one of the most enriching technical discussions I’ve had so far. The interview lasted around 50–55 minutes and covered a spectrum of topics — from fundamental OOP concepts and database management to a deep, detailed discussion around the projects on my resume. I’m happy to share that the experience went well, and I ultimately secured the offer. Here’s a detailed walkthrough of the interview. The interview began with a short personal introduction from both sides. I was asked to walk the interviewer through my background, technical interests, and key projects. This quickly set the tone for a conversation that was both technical and exploratory. 1. Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) A significant portion of the early interview revolved around OOP. The interviewer focused more on conceptual clarity and practical usage than theoretical memorization. Questions : What are the four pillars of OOP? Explain the difference between a class and an object. How does polymorphism differ at compile time vs runtime? What is abstraction, and how do you implement it in a real application? How do interfaces differ from abstract classes? If you were designing your Plant Recognition System using OOP, how would you structure the classes? How would you use inheritance or composition to reduce redundancy in your ML pipeline components. 2. Database Management Systems (DBMS) Though not the primary focus, the interview did assess my understanding of database fundamentals and real-world data design. Questions : What is normalization, and why is it important? Difference between primary key and unique key. Explain the different types of JOINs with examples. Design a table schema for storing movies and user ratings (related to my movie recommendation project). 3. Deep Dive into My Projects This was the longest and most detailed segment of the interview. The interviewer wanted to understand the depth of my involvement, my problem-solving approach, and the reasoning behind my technical decisions. A. Plant Recognition System Questions What dataset did you use and how did you prepare it? Why did you choose your specific model architecture? How did you handle class imbalance? If accuracy drops under low-light conditions, how would you improve robustness? How would you reduce inference time without significantly affecting accuracy? B. Movie Recommendation System Did you use collaborative filtering, content-based filtering, or a hybrid approach? What features did you extract? How did you compute similarity between users or movies? How do you measure the performance of a recommender system? How would you solve the cold-start problem for new users? How would you scale the recommendation pipeline as data volume grows? C. Camouflaged Object Detection This project attracted special attention due to its complexity and uniqueness. Questions : What makes camouflaged object detection a challenging task? Which model architecture did you use? How did you evaluate model performance? If objects blend almost perfectly with their surroundings, how can the model be improved? How would you adapt your model for real-time video detection? I think they were evaluating my understanding of model optimization, domain challenges, data processing, and deployment considerations. This is the end of questions. The interview concluded with a short discussion about: My preferred tech stack How I usually debug issues My willingness to learn new tools and adapt They also allowed me to ask questions about the role, team structure, and company culture. Final Result After some days, I received the confirmation that I had been selected for the SDE role at Hummingwave Technologies. The interview was well-structured, conversational, and intellectually engaging. What stood out most was the company’s emphasis on understanding thought process over memorized answers. This experience circulated around the importance of strong fundamentals combined with practical, hands-on project knowledge.

There was a test before the interview that consisted of aptitude and English grammar sections, followed by a technical interview. The technical interview mostly revolved around my projects and some CS fundamentals. Questions were asked from topics such as computer networks, OS, and DBMS. Most of the aptitude questions were of easy to medium difficulty, but the English grammar section was quite difficult. The interview is easy to clear if you can explain your projects clearly and confidently.