One Kings Lane Software Engineer interview questions

I was contacted by HR of this company through Linkedin. She had initial call with me for around 20min where she explained the position etc and asked me few technical questions (yes HR asked me tech questions). And the question were pretty simple, bitwise and logical OR, object model for vehicle which can be a car or a bike. After the first call I was setup for another phone interview with the hiring manager. This call was for an hour and I was asked algorithmic questions. One of the questions was about a file with strings in it which are sorted and to create a data structure to search the word when 4 letters of the word is typed. The interviewer was pretty easy going and was not looking for exact solution. Instead he was more interested in the approach. And then I was setup to talk to another engineering member on the phone for 45min. This one went well too. He asked just 1 question. And the problem was to find the first repeating letter in a string. i.e "abcdaer" is a given string so tell the position of first repeating letter that is 'a'. This interview went well too. But I did not hear back from them. So, I sent an email to the HR to know the result. She replied to the email and thanked for reminding her :-). Well, this whole process till now took 1 week. And then I was called for in-person interview the following week. I went to their office and HR received me at front desk. She took me to a conference room and little bit later informed me that the first interview is with an engineer instead of hiring manager as per the schedule. The first engineer walks into the room, introduces himself and without any further talk gives me a laptop and asks me to implement priority queue using the language of my choice. It was little odd as usually people start by talking about experience etc. But anyway, I tried implementing it but running it was a bit of a challenge as collabedit does not support it. After an hour next engineer came who asked me 10 different questions. Minessweeper, inner join, outer join, code to return true if in a string parentheses are closed (or valid) i.e "()()" is valid and return false if parentheses are not closed i.e. "((()" is invalid. It was almost an hour interview but then the hiring manager asked the interviewer to come out (he did not walk into the room, made some gestures for the engineer to come out through the glass wall). then HR came in the room to tell me that the team thought I was not a good fit. I found the in-person interview process pretty unfriendly and sorta rude.

Contacted the recruiter and she was professional in evaluating my experience and the kind of job I am looking for. She set up an initial phone interview.The phone interview consisted questions about my previous projects and experience and some DS questions. Finally the interviewer gave me a coding project to be completed. The question was based on the dynamic programming and I had sent him the code in a few hours. (took me longer than I expected). He was happy with my solution and I was called for on-site interview to meet with the team. I had to wait for about 20 minutes before some one could help me at the reception desk. I was then give a short tour of the company (which is indeed fantastic) before dropping me at the interview room. I met with 3 employees (scheduled with 4, but the 4th person could not make it for the interview) . I was tested on broad topics and each, really in depth. Q1) Design a minesweeper game (data structures used, algorithms for generating the mines, and generating the block number for the remaining squares) Q2) what design patterns can you use for constructing a vehicle garage site. Q3) I have a counter variable in DB whose value is incremented each time the webpage is hit. How will you scale the architechture when you have millions of hits? Q4) given all the integers in a character array, write a function the that returns the start index of a given integer q5) how willl you construct a file system q6) find all the unique strings in a trillion set of strings.