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dronacharya.ai

HCLTech

InternshipPlacementSoftwareData and ML

Built from 2 candidate reports with 8 first-hand accounts, covering 2026-27, 2025-26.

Hiring process

Roles: AI R&D Intern
  1. 1

    Online test

    Pen-and-paper assessment: ML MCQs, descriptive GenAI questions, pseudocode
    Pen and paper120 min21 questionsofflineeasy
    SectionQsTopics
    MCQ10supervised vs unsupervised, overfitting and underfitting, loss functions, LLM basics, agentic AI
    Descriptive5predictive vs generative AI, hallucination mitigation, RAG chunking pseudocode, agentic AI, chatbot architecture
    Coding / pseudocode6strings, arrays, matrix, digit sums, Sudoku

    machine learning · generative AI · RAG · LLMs · agentic AI · arrays · matrices

    Any programming language or plain English allowed. Extra credit for edge cases and multiple approaches. One account says it was the easiest OA of the season. Counts of coding questions vary slightly (4-6).

  2. 2

    Technical interview

    Combined technical and HR interview before a two-person panel
    40 minoffline

    project deep dive · RAG pipeline · quantisation · PCA · eigenvectors · bagging and boosting · SVM · precision and recall · transformers · explainable AI · KV cache · ACID · web deployment basics

    Length 30-45 min; two panels of two interviewers, one preferring AI/ML candidates. No dedicated HR round. HR-style topics: why this firm, family, college choice, offer comparison, team conflict, location. Project-heavy; one interviewer asked to leave out the self introduction.

Advice from candidates

59 pieces of advice, in their own words. Names removed.

  • Make sure you every single word written on your resume, it would be better if you had given mock interviews earlier.

    resume · 2026-27

  • Don’t fake your resume. They will deeply scan your entire resume, each and every single word. So, even having a small project with 100% knowledge is much more impressive than having a large project with very little or incomplete knowledge.

    resume · 2026-27

  • Put things on your resume that you are confident about, don’t fake anything, they will catch it easily.

    resume · 2026-27

  • Make sure you don’t lie on your resume; not knowing something you wrote on your resume will create a very bad impression. The interviewers will figure it out, so be honest.

    resume · 2026-27

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Question patterns reported

The kind of problem, not the problem itself. Our practice questions are written to match these patterns.

  • Onlinefind string length without built-in
  • Onlinesort one half ascending and the other descending
  • Onlinerepeated digit sum per element, two methods
  • Onlinefill two missing Sudoku cells
  • Onlinerotate a matrix 90 degrees
  • Onlinechunk a file with overlap
  • Onlinedesign a retrieval chatbot for college data
  • Technicalexplain PCA mathematically on paper to a non-expert panellist
  • Technicalexplain a technical concept to a 15-year-old
  • Technicalscale a project design for production
  • Technicalwhy cache keys and values but not queries
  • Codingpseudocode for a stated programming task with edge cases
  • Codingfix errors in a given snippet
  • Codinghigh-level design of a software system
  • Technicalone live DSA problem with complexity follow-ups