🚀 FlexTrade – Interview Experience (On-Campus)

📍 On-Campus | Pune
💼 Role: Associate Technical Analyst
🎓 Batch: 2027

🏢 Company Overview

FlexTrade Systems is a financial technology company that provides electronic trading and execution management solutions to financial institutions. The company works in the electronic trading and financial technology domain, where technology, troubleshooting, and system reliability are important.

📋 Application & Selection Process

• Application: On-Campus

• Online Assessment: Conducted at college

• Interview Process: Technical Round 1 → Technical Round 2 → HR

The overall process consisted of an Online Assessment followed by two technical interviews and an HR interview.

1️⃣ Online Assessment (OA)

📝 Total Questions: 19

The Online Assessment mainly covered:

• Linux

• C++ code/output-based MCQs

• Python code/output-based questions

• Basic programming concepts

• DSA

The OA tested basic programming knowledge, code understanding, and problem-solving ability.

The major focus areas were Linux, C++, Python, and basic DSA.

2️⃣ Technical Interview – Round 1

⏱ Duration: 20 minutes

The first technical round mainly focused on Linux, C++, OOP, STL and DSA.

🔹 Linux

The interviewer asked practical Linux-related questions such as:

• Which command can be used to find the location of a command?

• How would you search for an interviewer's name inside a file?

• How would you check whether a particular port is open or not?

• How can

  code

  1telnet

  be used to check connectivity to a particular port?

Some of the commands discussed were:

bash
1which <command>
2whereis <command>
3grep "name" filename
4ss -tuln
5telnet <hostname> <port>

🔹 C++ / OOP

The C++ discussion covered several fundamental OOP concepts.

Questions included:

• What is a virtual function?

• Why do we use virtual functions?

• What is polymorphism?

• What are the types of polymorphism?

• How do you implement polymorphism in C++?

• What is the difference between function overloading and overriding?

• What is shallow copy?

• What is deep copy?

• Why do we need constructors?

• Why do we need destructors?

• What are STL functions?

The discussion covered both compile-time and runtime polymorphism, along with practical implementation.

🔹 DSA

I was asked to find the second smallest element in an array and explain the most optimal approach.

The important part was not only finding the answer but also explaining the time and space complexity.

The optimal approach can be achieved in:

• Time:

  code

  1O(n)

• Space:

  code

  1O(1)

🔹 Why FlexTrade?

I was also asked:

Why FlexTrade?

The question was focused on understanding my motivation for joining the company and my interest in the Technical Analyst role.

3️⃣ Technical Interview – Round 2

⏱ Duration: 35 minutes

The second technical round focused more on C++, STL, coding, problem-solving, and logical puzzles.

🔹 Operator Overloading – Rectangle

One of the coding questions was:

Write code to add two instances of a Rectangle class.

I was asked to create a

1Rectangle

I solved it using operator overloading.

For example:

cpp
1Rectangle r3 = r1 + r2;

The

1+

The explanation was essentially:

Operator overloading allows us to define how an existing operator behaves for user-defined objects. Here, the

code

1+

operator normally works with numeric types, but we can overload it to define addition between two Rectangle objects.

The interviewer also asked me to explain the logic with a diagram.

Conceptually:

text
1       Rectangle r1
2       +-----------+
3       | L = 10    |
4       | B = 5     |
5       +-----------+
6             +
7       Rectangle r2
8       +-----------+
9       | L = 20    |
10       | B = 10    |
11       +-----------+
12             |
13             ↓
14        operator+
15             |
16             ↓
17       Rectangle r3
18       +-----------+
19       | L = 30    |
20       | B = 15    |
21       +-----------+

🔹 8-Stone Puzzle – One Stone Is Heavier

The interviewer asked the classic 8-stone/8-ball weighing puzzle.

There are 8 stones and one stone is heavier than the others. Find the heavier stone using the minimum number of weighings.

The minimum number of weighings is 2.

The stones can be divided as:

text
13 | 3 | 2

First:

text
1ABC vs DEF

If both sides balance, the heavier stone is among

1G

1H

text
1G vs H

If one side is heavier, take those three stones and weigh two of them against each other to identify the heavier stone.

🔹 Modified 8-Stone Puzzle

The interviewer then modified the problem:

What if we don't know whether the abnormal stone is heavier or lighter?

This makes the problem more challenging because there are two possibilities for every stone:

text
18 × 2 = 16 possible states

Each balance-scale weighing has three possible outcomes:

• Left side heavier

• Balance

• Right side heavier

With two weighings:

text
13² = 9

possible outcome combinations are available, which is not enough to distinguish all 16 possibilities.

Therefore, the problem requires 3 weighings with an appropriate strategy.

🔹 STL / String

The interviewer also asked about STL operations for strings/arrays.

For reversing a string:

cpp
1reverse(s.begin(), s.end());

For sorting in decreasing order:

cpp
1sort(s.begin(), s.end(), greater<char>());

The discussion also involved commonly used STL functions and their usage.

4️⃣ HR Interview

⏱ Duration: 20 minutes

The HR round focused mainly on introduction, family background, motivation, career goals, and basic behavioral questions.

🔹 Introduction

Tell me about yourself.

🔹 Family Background

Tell me about your family background.

🔹 Career Goals

Where do you see yourself after 2 years?

🔹 Why FlexTrade?

Why do you want to join FlexTrade?

🔹 Job Description

What do you understand about the Technical Analyst job description?

The discussion also covered basic behavioral questions such as:

• What are your strengths and weaknesses?

• Why do you want this role?

• Why should we hire you?

• How do you handle difficult situations?

• How do you work in a team?

• How do you handle disagreements?

• What are your career goals?

• Are you comfortable with relocation/shifts?

🎯 Overall Experience

Overall, the FlexTrade interview process covered a good combination of Linux, C++, OOP, STL, DSA, problem-solving, and HR/behavioral questions.

The major focus areas throughout the process were:

C++ + OOP + STL + Linux/Unix + DSA + Problem Solving + Company/Role Knowledge

For anyone preparing for a similar role, I would recommend focusing particularly on:

💻 C++

• OOP

• Virtual functions

• Polymorphism

• Function overloading/overriding

• Constructors & destructors

• Deep copy vs shallow copy

• Operator overloading

• STL

• Vectors, maps, sets

• Sorting and searching

🐧 Linux

• code

  1grep

• code

  1find

• code

  1which

• code

  1whereis

• code

  1telnet

• code

  1ss

• Processes

• File permissions

• Pipes

• Basic shell commands

🧠 DSA

• Arrays

• Strings

• Searching

• Sorting

• Hashing

• Time and space complexity

• Logical puzzles

🤝 HR

• Self-introduction

• Why FlexTrade?

• Why Technical Analyst?

• Career goals

• Family background

• Strengths and weaknesses

• Basic behavioral questions

💡 Key Takeaway

One of my biggest takeaways from the process was that knowing the fundamentals deeply is more important than simply knowing a large number of topics superficially.

The interviewers focused not only on definitions but also on whether I could write code, explain my approach, analyze complexity, and solve problems logically.

Also, be prepared for interviewers to modify a familiar problem or challenge your approach. In such situations, it is important to stay calm, understand the assumptions, and explain your reasoning clearly.

Overall, it was a good learning experience and gave me a better understanding of the technical expectations for an Associate Technical Analyst role.