I will post my interview experience with the respective timeline as the whole process spanned for nearly 5 months.
April 2021
Got an anonymous referral through blind for SWE-L3 role at the end of April. Recruiter reached out to me after 3 days to complete a HackerRank online assessment (OA) over the weekend.
HackerRank OA
2 questions to be completed in 90 minutes.
- Sliding Window Maximum - Passed all the test cases
- A JSON parser API problem - Not able to pass all the test cases. 2 to 3 test cases were failing. Was not able to debug it within the given time.
OA result
Recruiter reached out to me after 2 days. The result was what I expected as they said they would not be moving forward with my application and asked me to reach out after a month.
June 2021
I reached out to the same recruiter at the start of June, but unfortunately SWE-L3 roles were already filled for the respective team, so they asked me to apply in the careers portal directly. I know that the chances of me getting a call back after applying in the careers portal is close to zero, so I just applied for some relevant positions and moved on.
July 2021
During mid July, another recruiter from Twilio reached out to me. Fortunately as it was the same team as the one I completed the OA two months back, they were ready to schedule the virtual onsite rounds directly, but it was for SWE-L2 role. I went ahead with it as I don't want to miss this chance and scheduled my rounds at the end of July.
Virtual Onsite rounds
There were a total of 4 rounds scheduled across multiple days. Duration of each round is 45 minutes.
- Coding
- Design
- Hiring Manager
- Bar Raiser
Coding
A data structure design problem related to deque with some constraints. I'm not able to find a similar problem on leetcode, but can categorize it to medium-hard difficulty. I was able to come up with an optimal solution, but the whole 35 minutes went on with just the discussion (about approach and complexity analysis) and explanation of how it behaves for different input scenarios as there were a lot of edge cases handling.
Thus, I didn't write a single line of code in the coding interview :-|
Design
- Variation of Random pick with weight with a couple of follow-up questions. Interviewer didn't ask me to code the solution, just checked the approach and explanation of how it behaves for different input scenarios.
- Asked to explain in detail about the design of one of my recent projects I worked on. Had a couple of follow-ups, like what would I do differently if given a chance etc.
Hiring Manager
Standard behavioral questions were asked. Similar to Amazon LPs, Twilio has magic values defined. All the questions asked were based on the defined values.
Bar Raiser
This is also a behavioral round, but the questions were focused on hypothetical scenarios that I would face in the future and how would I handle it.
Onsite result
Recruiter reached out 2 days after my last onsite round. The result was also as I expected, that all the interviews except the coding round went well. At this point, I thought it would be a rejection but they gave me another chance to redo the coding round. I was really happy with that and scheduled the coding round at the start of August.
August 2021
Additional coding round
- Variation of Climbing stairs
- LRU cache
Solved both the problems optimally and was able to fully implement and run my code successfully with the test inputs.
Result
Recruiter reached out 2 days after the coding round, mentioned I got a positive feedback from the interviewer and that I got selected. Hurray!
Compensation details: https://leetcode.com/discuss/compensation/1442678/Twilio-or-L2-or-Bangalore-or-August-2021