Interview Experience

Current Employment:

Education: B.Tech in Computer Science from a Tier 2 college.
Experience: ~9 years in Product Development.
Position: Lead Software Engineer with product based company in Gurgaon

Date: Jan 2022
I was apporached by a recruiter through LinkedIn for a Backend role.

Note: I will not be able to share the exact problems due to NDA.

Screening Round (Jan end):
The problem was based on greedy. I first solved it using Pririty Queue, but the interviewer asked me to solve without extra memory...so I used sorting and two pointers.
Variation of https://leetcode.com/problems/meeting-rooms-ii/
The interviewer also asked some questions around my current role and my expectations. Why I am looking for a change and some situational questions.

Got the positive feedback. The recruiter then scehduled 5 rounds of interview (1 hr each) in the span of 2 weeks in Feb.

Onsite Interviews(on zoom only :P):

Round 1 (Coding) - Got 2 LC medium questions, one was to design a DS (kind of hashmap) with some added functionalities and the other one was related to binary search.
It went well, wrote progrrams for both in 30-35 mins....then some 10 mins discussion around current projects.

Round 2 (Coding) - This was a LC hard problem, somewhat variation of text justifiication but with added rules, it was a bit more difficult. I wrote the program in some 25-30 mins, but a few cases were missed. Then some questions on my projects and my role.
Variation of https://leetcode.com/problems/text-justification/

Round 3 (Hiring Manager Round) - A lot of discussions on current project and tech stack. Questions on why some tech was chosen, comparison b/w RMQ and Kafka....a lot of questions on similar lines. 30-35 mins discussion around that only.
Then a design problem was given. I was able to give the solution and we discussed 10-15 mins on SQL vs NoSQL, concurrency, scalabiliity etc.
Then last 5-10 mins interviewer explained me about the role and the product I would be working on.

Round 4 (Bartender Round) - Someone outside the team took my interview. He gave me 1 LC medium problem reelated to BFS (chessboard). I wrote the program in some 15 mins.
Then we switched to discussion on distributed systems, Elasticsearch (my project related), some SRE/ CI CD stuff.

Round 5 (Coding) - First question was to implement LRU cache, and then 1 other LC medium question realted to Anagrams. I wrote the programs for both in around 30 mins.
We discussed 10-15 mins about my projects and some leadership questions.

After 1 week, the recuiter followed back with the feedback being positive and asked my expectations and current CTC etc.
Then after 2 days the recruiter called me again and told me what they can offer.