Status: 4+ YOE at eBay, MSc (CS) from a Top CS School in Germany
Position: Consultant (since Oct'20)
Location: Hamburg, Germany
Interview Date: January 11, 2021

Coding challenge (30 mins):

• It was on Hackerrank
• The coding language was restricted to JS as I had applied for a full-stack role.
• Its on the same level as the practise test that was also given.

HR screen (25 mins):

• A call with the recruiter explaining the role and the benefits that Yelp offers
• It also involved some basic questions about my motivation to leave my current job and what I am looking for in my new role.

Technical phone screen (45 mins):

• Involved an initial intro with an Yelp Engineer and then a live coding session in Hackerrank
• The question started out to have a very simple solution, but later on the interviewer added more constraints to iterate on the solution. I then adapted the code to new requirements.
• I liked this kind of iterative approach better as it is close to real-life coding.
• I was informed on the same day that I was moving forward to the onsite rounds.

Onsite (4 rounds):

• Round 1 (Behavioral - individual)
  This round was testing my motivation in the projects that I have worked on in the past. The questions were basically around explaining a particular scenario where I demonstrated xxx in the past/ how I got around a particular road block or a tough situation. Some of the questions were pertaining to project ownership, successes, failures, and my areas of interest in tech and my future aspirations. The interviewer also added some follow-up questions.

• Round 2 (Systems design)
  In this round, I was expected to design a Push notification system that sends notifications to user's mobile devices. The notifications gets sent by a batch process which runs on a scheduled basis and processes the requests which have already been submitted. I was expected to design only the processing part - identifying the messages to be sent, their contents etc and the handshake with third party providers to send final notifications to Android/iOS devices was left out.
  This round also happened on Hackerrank, with the help of their whiteboard platform. Unlike other system design interviews, in addition to drawing out an initial design in the whiteboard app, I was also expected to write some barebones code to illustrate my DB schema design. This was a simple problem where the interviewer expected me to design a generic notification systems that can handle different types of notifications/messages.

• Round 3 (Behavioral - team work)
  In this round, I was asked questions regarding my ability to handle team conflicts or my ability to mentor other members. Some areas include: my past collaboration, conflict and feedback strategies, and mentorship I’ve given and received. Some questions that I remember include - describe a scenario where you were in conflict with another team member and how did you resolve it, have you received critical feedback and how did you handle it, have you mentored other team members or did you receive mentorship (in that case what did you think your mentor did best that helped you be at your best). There were some follow-up questions in cases when my answers were not clear or more appropriate to the question asked.

• Round 4 (Coding)
  This round involved a similar challenge to the phone screen. The problem was to be solved in Hackerrank. After I ran my initial optimal solution with successful results, the interviewer added additional constraints to the problem. Since we had some time left, I was also expected to code the new changes. Finally we also discussed about the next steps and somewhat about the team that the interviewer was part of.

Result: I received an offer and the turn around time was quicker because I had another competing offer. Normally, it takes about a week to hear back on their decision.

P.S: All coding questions are similar to the ones already available on glassdoor. Be prepared with some questions to ask all the interviewers at the end of the interview, this was helpful in my case to understand the culture and the tech stack at Yelp. Except the initial coding challenge which I solved in javascript, I solved the other two coding questions in Java, although the job was for full-stack. So they test candidates on a programming language-agnostic way, so feel free to use your best programming language.