Backend Engineering Interview Preparation

I joined IK to improve my problem solving skills as an engineer and I must say, the program went beyond my expectation. The pre-class contents are well put together, the live instructors are really great. I also love the fact that I have access to lots of mock interviews which really helped me to gauge my level on different topics and I used it to determine whether I am ready for the real interviews or not. Additionally, I love the fact that I could connect with the instructors, interviewers etc on Linkedin. To have a lifetime access to all the contents on uplevel is a great deal for me because I can reference them anytime I need to refresh my knowledge on the topics. I would recommend IK to anyone who is looking to improve their problem solving skills and/or preparing for interviews.

Interview Kickstart has the best instructors in the industry and great interviewers. They helped me get an offer from linkedin in less than a year. Amazing curriculum, they teach you the basis first and then they move to advanced topics that will make medium topics a lot easier. The interviewers are experienced and are willing to share their knowledge and teach you to become a better applicant.

This is a great program to get up skilled and prepare yourself to meet your career goals. The course program is designed with lot of thought and covers all the facets of interviewing.Instructors are very knowledgeable and from the top companies 

I am currently a student at @IK, and so far my experience with IK is excellent in terms of instructors, foundational materials, and support. I believe the curriculum is really good thanks to Omkar Deshpande. It is also a good platform to meet good techies from top-tier companies and learn from them, and connect with them, which is one of the best parts for me. Most of the instructors stay for some more time after their classes to answer additional questions students may have technical and no technical which I appreciate. The turnaround time of the support team is quite good in terms of scheduling classes/ other career coaching sessions for you or sharing pre-recorded videos from the past. I am also getting support from my student success associate Megha Tyagi and Career Transformation Manager Priya Lucas, Both of them connect with me to check my progress and provide their suggestions to improve. Whenever I have any concerns and need any help they immediately connect with me on my request. Overall, I feel good about my decision to join the Interview Kickstart program.  

I found the Backend Engineering program at Interview Kickstart to be very helpful in my interview preparation journey. Although it comes with a hefty initial price tag, it pays for itself if you stick with it. If you can afford it, and are looking to improve your interviewing skills in an efficient way, I highly recommend it. I did try other methods of studying for software engineering interviews(Udemy courses, youtube videos, Educative courses, SWE books) but IK worked out best for me as I found all the relevant content on a single platform. Mock interviews are very similar to real life SWE interviews and also provide in-depth feedback at the end. Training videos and classes discuss each topic in detail and are accessible forever. I also used their help with salary negotiation and they were very helpful in helping me come to a decision about my offers. Based on my personal experience, I highly recommend it.

The courses I was given were properly detailed and inclusive. I could get insight about the boundaries of lectures and topics. Practical examples were so instructive. When it comes the mockup interviews, everyone I spoke with, from IK, provided excellent guidance and took the time to answer all of my questions.

I thoroughly enjoyed going through the interview kickstart course. I learnt a lot of small but significant details related to interviews and problem solving from the instructors in the live class. The experience of learning their thought processes and understanding the why behind solutions was extremely helpful. The behavioral section course was extremely useful for me specially. I put in the effort to learn from the instructors by asking questions and being proactive in classes and it has been paying dividends ever since. The staff has been extremely helpful in ensuring my success and I am very grateful for having had the opportunity to learn from this program. I would highly recommend taking this course to ace any interview of your choice.

I entered Interview Kickstart in January 2022.I had tried to tackle leetcode and system design on my own but it wasdifficult because there is such a wide breadth of knowledge that you have to know.The best part of IK is that they structure everything out for you so youdon't have to worry about planning everything, half the struggle of studying for big tech is just mapping out what to learn and in what orderbut since IK did that all for me,  I was able to focus on the most important part which was just learning and doing problems.I think the system design part was also great because if you have no real experience in architecture (like me) it is hard to grasp someof the concepts. There is no real substitute for it on other platformslike YouTube which tend to focus on the Leetcode style problems more.System design content tends to be relatively sparse, so the resources on IK regarding it were kind of priceless for me.I found Omkar's videos in particular very helpful. I think he has a great way of explaining concepts as if you have never approached them before.And lastly when it came to apply, IK had this really convenient way to track what you were applying to. It was daunting to try and do it on my own, but the system they have makes it much easier.Overall I am very satisfied with their service and would recommend it to anyone trying to get into FAANG/Unicorn as a Software Engineer.

I joined IK in July end  and it has been amazing journey so far. All the instructors are from Faang companies and having passion towards helping students in achieving their goals. There are primary goals to join the Faang company itself, but there are many benefits which has secondary benefits but it's more important that the first one. Wherever you join, you become confident leader, engineer with fully equipped to dive deep or to go wide. Contents were choosen very intelligently and all kudos goes to Omkar . He is amazing in explaining  complex thing in simple way and of so humble behaviour, amazing. 

Attended Interview Kickstart for preparation of tech interviews, this is a great platform for people who are planning to take tech interviews.  

I have enrolled in backend engineering program about 3 months ago with Interview Kickstart and I must say, it has been the best educational investment I have made in my life. Shortly after starting the program, I was already feeling confident about acing the interviews. Before even completing the program (and even without taking any mock interviews they offer), I have interviewed with various companies including start ups and FAANG companies and have received multiple offers and accepted a position with a company that has been my long time goal to get into and for that I have to thank to superior instructors of the Interview Kickstart.First of all, their lead instructor - Omkar Deshpande is a brilliant engineer and a teacher. He covers almost all of the foundational material regarding data structures / algorithms and most of the systems design section as well. He covers almost every detail related to the subject at hand with logical/mathematical proofs and various examples. His teaching style is engaging, thorough and very compressive. I am a visual learner mostly and the fact that every single topic at hand is explained by drawing has been such a good experience that, I asked the staff to tell me what device/app the instructor is using and I bought myself one and have been using it to take notes. I learned more from watching his lectures about computer science then I have throughout my entire career and that is no exaggeration.After each subject, there is plenty of practice problems to be done as well as timed tests. After the practice questions/tests another lecture is held outlining and going over the practice questions/tests. You can ask any questions you have about the subject at any time to instructors and staff. The entire staff of interview kickstart is helpful, prompt and knowledgeable people, I haven't had an instance where I didn't have my questions answered. I was even offered help through out my offer negotiations which I'm deeply thankful for which resulted in a better offer.As if the core content is not enough, there is an optional material for almost all of the topics covered that go even deeper within each subject. I don't think there is many algorithms that they do not cover to the point that you probably won't see them in an interview but If you mention or implement one of these, you will for sure amaze the interviewer. After going through the dynamic programming part of the curriculum, I had an interview which I solved the question using DP and the interviewer didn't anticipate such a solution and wasn't familiar with DP. Needless to say, this presents a great opportunity to display the breadth of knowledge you have and to teach the interviewer something they didn't know about. Also, I used to be a person that was terrified of dynamic programming, but turns out that was caused by the fact that I didn't understand anything about it, now it became one of my favorite tools to use to tackle some of the most daunting algorithm questions.For those of you who want to learn computer science in detail and become an overall better engineer, this is the best education there is out there and I feel confident in saying that because I have used other online materials, taken other online classes and none of them even come close to what Interview kickstart has to offer. If you ask me, I find the price of the course to be very cheap considering the amount of quality material they offer.I guess, the results should talk for themselves if you want to gauge the quality of a course and various offers that I got and the ease with which I went through the technical interviews prove that. To top that off, I was offered a position at an amazing company that surpasses what I used to make by more than 100%.The catch is, this program is not for those who are looking for an easy fix, as I said all the topics at hand are covered in deep granularity and often complex. One needs to allocate a lot of time if you want to improve and become a better engineer. But the rewards are very well worth it.

Preparing for software interviews (tech) is no joke and Tier 1 companies are entirely a different LEAGUE. But if you have the RIGHT TECHNIQUE and MINDSET the probability of cracking TIER 1  interviews increases 1000 fold. This is where Interview kickstart helps exceptionally. I personally went through 1st part of my training and i can already see the shift in my coding skills. I used to be scared of TREES , GRAPHS and DYNAMIC PROGRAMMING problems. But now i am ENJOYING solving these problems.I am not downplaying the HARDWORK and FOCUS that goes in initially.Its a lot of work but knowing that you will eventual get to a place where you can ENJOY solving technical problems makes it all worthwhile. Best parts i adore about IK (PROS) :1)Outstanding learning material (truly world class curated over years).2)1-on-1 coaching upon request(Once you see an expert solve a problem - things just seem to flow and make sense)3)Practice tests and class problems (Completing these tessts with 100% clarity will help you clear low level rounds easily ).4) MOCK INTERVIEWS (extremely useful in finding the blind spots in thinking and approach)5)Support Period (+ access to the material for life)CONS:It seems a bit pricey at first.[But if you seek the value in the program cost won't be an issue.Specially if you see this as investment.]At this point i have not yet attended interviews but i can say this with certainity that I am a much better Engineer now after joining IK. My honest recommendation go for IK - if you want to become a BETTER ENGINEER not just crack a FAANG-M interview and INVEST in your CAREER and your future.

I've been taking the backend engineering course in Interview Kickstart for about two months. So far I enjoyed the experience a lot. I believe what I learned from classes and study materials can really help me to solve actual coding challenges since the course is focusing more on helping its student building up the mindset for solving a problem, including how to analysis the question, clarify the problem, transform or break-down it into simpler problems and apply what we learned for solve those basic problem. The Student Success Advocate(SSA) is highly engaged to me, and even call me on the phone when I missed one of the live class.

I was looking for a new job and needing help preparing for the technical interviews. I signed up with Interview Kickstart at the end of January, 2022. I started interviewing in June and landed several job offers, including those from my top choices. Thanks to IK, this job search was much more successful than my previous ones. My problem solving skills were significant improved. I felt more confident during the interviews. IK covered a wide range of topics such as sorting, recursions, trees, graphs, dynamic programming, linked list, strings, etc. I ended up solving more than 300 problems on LeetCode during the course of preparation. I found it useful to have the recordings of previous classes so that I could watch in my own time and at my own pace. More than helping me get a job, IK made me a better engineer. Strongly recommended.

I believe this course would air to the prep for Technical interviews . Rather than cramming leetcode , people should invest in interview kickstart to significantly boost their chances of cracking technical interviews. 

Interview kickstart is a fabulous coding academy. They have many interesting foundation videos. It helped me to get good grasp of concepts of Recursion, Dynamic Programming and other important topics. The instructor is an alumni of IIT and Stanford PhD graduate with great teaching skills. 
IK provided me an opportunity to schedule mock interviews with managers at Google, Amazon, and many other top notch companies. This gave me a glimpse of challenges I would face in a real interview and feedback helped to take definitive steps towards enhancing interviewing skills. They also have technical coaching and system design session which help you to schedule 1:1 discussions with experts. 
This course helps you connect fellow learners with similar background and attend sessions together. They allow everybody to ask questions which enable you to envision problems faced by engineers with 20+ years of experience. 
IK has a coding platform which resembles Leet-Code. It is well organized and curated so that you practice the concepts learned in class. 
It would be very helpful if you join this course after 3+ years of experience as it connects you best people in industry with 25+ years of experience. They truly care about your growth and ready help you go Up Level. I would highly recommend and it's worth the amount you spend. 

If you are a experience engineer, with experience working on data structures and you are finding it challenging to clear technical interviews, this course is perfect for you. The course material is well organized and high quality, the kind you would see is a DS course in top graduate schools, the Instructors are just the best people on this earth who are passionate and genuinely interested to see you crack interviews. Instructors are experts in the field yet so down to earth and humble.

I have learned a lot about Data structure and algorithms with real-world use cases.   The system design and career session were very useful. Interview kickstart is a very good place to up your level tech industry.

Took a comprehensive backend engineer program. Pros:1. Helped me land a job in FAANG2. Omkar's videos are absolute gold standard and some are even better than Stanford course explainations. Perfectly tailored to crack interviews3. Additional benefits like mock interviews and offer negotiation was just amazing4. A couple of sys design instructors are really good and provided good templatesCould be better: 1. Some vital material is provided only when asked for. That ideally should be provided to all candidates2. Some instructors explainations and teaching could surely be better.

The course is specialized in back end engineering track.