Workday Software Engineer Interview Guide 

The recruiter screen is a 30-minute interview with the recruiter. This is an exercise to primarily assess if your experience and skill sets are a good match for the job. Many questions in the Recruiter screen are based on your previous experience/resume. So, make it a point to be thoroughly prepared with your resume. Keep your answers short, crisp, and structured. Interviewers may also be interested in knowing your motivation for the role. So, rehearse some of the most commonly asked questions, such as "Why do you want to work for Workday?"

After the recruiter screen, you will be facing a technical online test on the HackerRank platform. This is a timed test consisting of 3 medium-difficulty coding questions to be completed in 120 minutes. The online test consisted of 3 problems, one in Java, one in SQL, and one in JavaScript.

• Write a code to perform Breadth First Search (BFS) traversal of a 2-d matrix with memoization to find the shortest weighted path."
• Given a String of [a-z, A-Z, 0-9], find the length of the longest substring that satisfies the following rules: a substring cannot contain digits [0-9], a substring should contain at least one capital character [A-Z]. e.g., given the String "aqW9ertyz", the longest valid substring has length 3 ("aqW").

Next up is the Phone screen. The phone screen is a telephonic interview round with a Workday Hiring Manager. This interview will last for about 45 minutes. The interviewer may ask a few technical questions and discuss the job responsibilities of the current role. Questions in this round are going to be theoretical and conceptual. So, revise your fundamentals well. Focus on Coding, especially OOPS concepts and system design questions.

• Can you call the base class method without creating an instance?
• What do you understand by method overloading?
• What is the difference between OOPS and Procedural programming?
• What do you know about load balancing? What is its importance in system design?
• Explain the steps involved in incorporating microservices into an e-commerce platform.
• How would you determine the goal and scale of a system?
• What do you understand by Polymorphism?

After clearing the phone screen, the next round is the onsite round. The onsite round is the most complicated stage of the entire interview process. You will spend roughly 7 hours on the interview day facing multiple interviews. The onsite round consists of a total of 3 interviews as under: 

• Coding interview
• System Design interview
• Behavioral interview

Coding interview

The coding interview will involve writing code, debugging a given piece of code, and algorithms. The choice of language is up to the candidate, but interviewers prefer candidates well-versed in common programming languages such as C, C++, and Python.

System design interview

System design interview involves situational questions wherein you are asked to design the frontend/backend of apps, websites, etc. You may also be asked questions on scalability, multithreading, distributed systems, and Unified Modeling Language (UML) diagrams.

Behavioral interview

The behavioral interview is 1-hour long and is conducted by HR managers from Workday. This interview mainly aims to test a candidate's motivation for the role, leadership skills, and how good a fit they will be in the company. Questions are primarily situation-based. 

• Focus on scenario-based system design questions as these are always asked
• Cover the UML part well since Workday software engineer interviews almost always include a few UML questions.
• Cover theory of static parts of concepts in sufficient depth as interviewers love to dive deep in the onsite round.

Coding Interview

• Given a few classes representing a school directory system, design and justify your design for OOP inheritance.
• Write a function to print duplicate characters from a string.
• Write a function to check if two strings are anagrams of each other.
• Write a program to print the first non-repeated character from a string.
• Write a function to reverse a string using recursion.
• You are given a list of lists and write a function to find the smallest interval of numbers that includes a number from each list.
• How do you check if a string contains only digits?
• Tell us how you enable garbage collection in Java.

System Design Interview

• Explain the concept of lower latency interaction.
• Create the UML diagram of a filesystem
• Design a database for recording workouts
• Give me an idea about distributed microservices

Behavioral Interview

• Why do you want to work for Workday?
• Tell me about a time you had a conflict with a co-worker.
• What draws you to software and services engineering as a career?
• Tell us about a challenge you faced at work and how did you overcome that.