Texas Instruments SDE 1 Interview Experience | 2 DSA + LLM Project + SQL

Edit:- The experience and details are completely my own; I just used AI to structure and summarize the post for readability.

Hi everyone, I recently interviewed with Texas Instruments and thought I’d share my experience in case it helps someone preparing for a similar interview.

The interview was around 1 hour long.

They started with 2 DSA questions:

1. Graph question – The wording was a little tricky/confusing at first, but the underlying problem was basically detecting a cycle in a graph.
2. Longest Substring Without Repeating Characters.

I was able to solve both. It took me roughly 30 minutes for the two questions because I first had to explain my approach, discuss it with the interviewer, and then code it once the approach was accepted. They also went through the test cases with me.

For the remaining 30 minutes, they moved on to my experience and asked some questions based on my previous work.

After that, we discussed one of my projects, which was related to RAG/LLMs, and they asked a few questions around that.

Towards the end, they asked some SQL questions as well. They gave me a query and asked how I would go about optimizing it.

Overall, I’d say the interview was pretty decent and the conversation was comfortable. Nothing particularly unexpected apart from the graph question being worded a bit differently than I initially expected.

That’s pretty much it. Hope this helps anyone preparing for TI interviews!