Current Employment Status

• Education: B.Tech from a Tier 3 college.
• Experience: ~1.5+ years in one of the best product-based SaaS company.
• Position: L2
• Location: Bangalore(currently WFH)
• Date: March 2022

Applied on LinkedIn and recruiter reached out to me.

Note: Won’t be sharing specific questions due to NDA 👍

Hackerrank Coding Round(1.5hr):

Note: Remote machine was provided where all tasks can be performed

1. Create a web server for an application and host it.
   • Provided desired output in the question which should be achieved at the end.
   • You can use any tools to complete the task
   • For web server Nginx, Apache is a known tool which can be used.
   • To create an application one can use nodeJS/Python
   • Simple application, not any full fledged app expected.
   • Idea here was to test the knowledge and tools which will be applicable.
2. Perform some mathematical operations via an IaC tool
3. Both questions should run with a single command and output in terminal sequentially. [You can add a bash function in .bashrc or create a custom script to trigger it]
4. Coding question easy - medium level related to string and regex

The recruiter followed up with the feedback being positive. My following rounds were scheduled in next coming weeks.

Onsite Interview(each round lasted 45-60mins):

1. Round 1 (Senior EM - screening) -

   • Intro - current team and work
   • All questions related to my current work, role and responsibility and some around Twilio magic values
   • What is DevOps and importance of it
   • Some questions around Backend tools and frameworks that I used
   • Some tell me about a time questions …. 😛 related to current work and leadership/responsibility
   • Also questions around learning techniques and patterns that i follow like - how would you learn a new tech/framework in given amount of time.

2. Round 2 (Senior EM - Design) -

   • Intro
   • Picked one major project and discussed HLD/LLD of it
     • Explained it in diagrammatic manner by drawing each component and data flows.
     • What is the problem we are solving and what’s the scale of it.
     • Challenges faced and steps to overcome
     • What is the scale of the problem that is solved due to this project and impact created
     • Why use this tools, languages and frameworks i.e justification for each component used and what alternate could have been used.

3. Round 3 (Senior PM - Bar Raiser) 

   • Never prepared for the bar raiser questions but fortunately each questions was relatable to my current work
   • No intro, interviewer introduced himself in a brief manner
   • Only tell me about a time questions 😜 as expected
   • .. when you have a feature request from customer and how did you implement it differently from expected flow
   • .. when you had to keep involvement with multiple teams and how did you complete it in time and pushed to prod
   • .. when you took initiative and brought impact to your team and what were the results
   • … when you had failure in delivering task or issue in production when deployed to prod.
   • ... if given a new product team to work on, how would you scale, improve and set processes in order to level up the team.
   • Tell me about your recent manager review and how did you improve on it.
   • large scale Project you worked on what were the challenges, impact, problem statement and effects of it.

4. Round 4 (EM - Hiring manager) -

   • Intro from both side very descriptive and long intro 😬
   • Told me about his team and what will be my responsibility
   • What expectations i should have from my role
   • What are the steps and processes if you are about to start a new product in a company(required E2E detailed flow)
     • Expectations: product building, market knowledge, POC, internal implementation, beta launch and finally pushing to public. - HL overview but interviewer asked in depth of each of those topics
   • about a time when i experienced a large scale project and how did we took it to completion
   • How did i get into tech, my journey and what motivates me to work in this industry.
   • About all technical things that i worked on in my company and regarding personal projects.
   • how do you learn any new technical topic from scratch.

5. Round 5 (Senior developer - Coding/LLD) -

   • Intro
   • Design question
     • Given an website application how would you design backend infra such that it can handle concurrent requests from users and how will you scale
     • Performance should not be degraded, no downtime should be observed during deploys and upgrade
     • fault tolerance, rollback support and CI/CD support
     • was looking for a microservices architecture over here using k8s and docker I suppose
   • Asked about various docker instructions in docker file
   • How to tag a docker image using automation
     • was looking for tools used and logic implementaation for this task
   • What is the flow of an request when applications connects it to internal servers and what components comes in place and how it is served, in short → complete flow chart
     • expected components: ALB/ELB, route53 DNS, Redis, Firewall, web server(nginx), proxies, reverse proxy, CDN, etc. → completed the flow combining using such components
   • How will you deploy a new application version to prod without any downtime and issues at user ends
   • Automate building new versions of docker image and applying to respective application which uses it.

6. Round 6 (HR round) -

   • Final verdict and interview feedback
   • Salary negotiation and comp breakdown

Overall interview process took around 1-1.5 months since interviewers were from different timezones, meetings were scheduled on a weekly basis and some times bi-weekly basis.

Let me know your thoughts or doubts in comments :)
Compensation details over here