Status: Working as Senior Staff/Principal Software Engineer in SFO.
Position: Staff Software Engineer
Location: Sunnyvale, CA
Phone Interviews:
Staff/Background Interview: (60 mins)
10 mins - Quick intro on interviewer
Topics:
Leadership:
Roles of SE and SSE and how do you transition SE to SSE, conflict resolution with your peer
Execution:
Bit of high level SD questions. Single monolithic application into components
Craftsmanship:
How well you did? - challenges and most proud work etc
5 mins - any questions from interviewee.
Technical Phone Screen: (60 mins)
5 mins - Quick intro on interviewer
Question #1: Evaluate Reverse Polish Notation (LC # 150) - Medium
https://leetcode.com/problems/evaluate-reverse-polish-notation/description/
Question #2: Two Sum - Data structure design (LC # 170) - Easy
https://leetcode.com/problems/two-sum-iii-data-structure-design/description/
Followup question: How do you design this for three sum? (Just talking no implementation)
5 mins - any questions from interviewee.
Tips:
- Please ensue to relate to examples in your life for each question in background round.
- Talk out loud on all possile approaches for the problems and why you pick the one you implemented in Phone interview.
Onsite Interviews:
Host Manger Round: (60 mins)
Explained about his/her role.
Some of the questions:
Are you managing people. Hiring/firing?
Day in the life activities?
How much you code?
Current web architecture
At what point yiu involve your Manager?
Some sytem design scenarios: Companies merge scenarios and how we handle those? Migration scenarios.
Coding + Algorithm: (60 mins)
Two sorted array minimum product [Leetcode hard]
https://leetcode.com/problems/find-k-pairs-with-smallest-sums/
Lunch Interview Round: (60 mins) [Feedback is recorded here]
About what he/she does and side project
Linked 1.0, 2.0, 3.0
Economics graph
Asked abour LinkedIn cluture/framework on ML Opportunities.
What companies you are interviewing?
What you want to do in the new companies?
Staff Craftsmanship: (60 mins)
Some questions were focussed on:
Quality
Code review
Test suite importance
Any trade off for code review?
How did you train your junior engineer about craftsmanship - example?
How did you train your senior engineer about craftsmanship - example?
Decision making skill and example
Trade off between scalability, performance, quality.
Trade off between performance issues + new feature with business value
System Design Round: (60 mins)
API limiter
Coding + Implementation: (60 mins)
Word justifier (Have to define the input and ourput) [Leetcode hard]
https://leetcode.com/problems/text-justification/
Tips:
- Focus more here as this is critical for Staff SE. Grokking SD will help here but be prepared for anything.
- Be ready to explain the strategy/algorithm upfront and agree on that before coding.
Feedback:
They didn't find me a match for Staff SE and so they asked me to come onsite again (with limited rounds) for Senior SE.
Follow up Onsite Interviews:
System Design: (60 mins)
Trending Article on LinkedIn
There is an API that is writing the Shared Article URN to DB continuously. Use this API to get the trending article on LinkedIn.
Coding Round: (60 mins)
Find leaves of the binary tree: (LC Med)
https://leetcode.com/problems/find-leaves-of-binary-tree/
All O(1) data structure: (LC Hard)
https://leetcode.com/problems/all-oone-data-structure/
Feedback:
Recruiter called after 2 days and said HC decided not to move forward as everything look good but pretty close to the bar. Also they mentioned that i dont have any recommendations on my Linkedin profile. Askd me to try again as Staff SE in the following year.