Status: 13 years experience. Currently at eBay MTS1
Position: Sr/Staff software engineer
Location: California or Austin, TX
Date: August 2021

All interviews are 45 minute.

Phone interview

1. Intros
2. Binary search and linear search and implementation
3. System design of tinyurl

In person interview
Round 1

1. Behavioral with engineering leader - a lot of situation based questions, questions about leadership, tell me about a time questions etc.,

Round 2

1. Behavioral with hiring manager - situational base questions - tell me about a time type of questions

Round 3

1. Technical/behavioral - level order traversal of a binary tree - system design for peer to peer network which crawls a website. I provided a solution using queues etc., but he was looking for a distributed peer to peer network, which i was trying to explain but didn't had much idea on.

Round 4

1. Technical/behavioral - tech questions java spring etc.,- system design - geo hash based question - heavy on write and low reads - explained it to him.

Round 5

1. Interviewer did not show up

Round 6

1. Behavioral with another hiring manager - lot of situational and tell me about a time questions.

Round 7

1. Full on technical - asked about authentication, encryption, PKI, Tokens, Cassandra, difference between dbs, RESTFUl, why nosql, spring, etc., - Group anagrams which also included numbers in it. The words 'Car' and 'car' are case insensitive and they belong to one group.

2 days later Recruiter said that he received a very positive feedback and they are going to schedule the round 5 which was missed .
--weekend--
3 days later they said that they are going to go with the feedback they have without the 5th round.
2 days later i got a reject saying that they went with other candidate and i'm no longer being considered.

The first time recruiter approached me regarding the feedback, i understood that it is a 50:50 chance for me, that delay in giving feedback is probably a way to keep me waiting until other interviews were done. I felt confidant through out the process, i think in round 7, i did not give answers to some questions even though i know the answer, that and since this is a very senior level position, i think the behavioral/leadership is also important to them, i might have under performed there. Also the peer to peer network question was a drawback. Over all, i think it is an easy interview.

tips : Be confidant. Ask a lot of questions before jumping into the solution. Try to understand the differences between various DBs and when to use them. Keep doing leetcode problem every once in a while even when you are not looking for job, that helped me attend this interview with only 1.5 weeks of preparation for face to face, the whole process took 3.5 weeks. Good luck.