Status: 6 years of experience
Current Position: Tech Lead at Paytm
Location: Noida, India
Date: May 2022
Interviewing for: Tech Lead - Arcecium

R1 - Screening Round:
(Basic coding questions)

R2 - DB Modelling Round:
Design Stack Overflow

1.Sharding in SQL
2.Sharding in NoSql - How to choose a routing key
3.Internal working of a clustered index. How B/B+ Tree works?
4.Split Brain Problem
5.Ranking in ES using weights

R3 - System Design Scalability and Resilience
1.Advantages and disadvantages of microservices
2.How log stash works
3.How to handle api throttling
4.Kafka Architecture and working
5.Vertical and horizontal scaling
6.Drawbacks of vertical scaling
7.Design a PDF Converter - Draw HLD on White Board

R4 - Coding round
You have game levels- L1, L2, L3, L4. ... Logs are printed as a random character and levels as a combination. Return is valid logs or not.

1.You are not allowed to skip levels. eg L2 should come after L1 in the logs and not L3 else invalid.
2. Greater levels cant come after lower levels. eg.L1 cannot come after L2 and so on for all levels
3.Above problem is to be executed in parallel processing via threads. Write proper runnable code and run it with various test cases.

R5 - Hiring Manager round
1.General questions abount kafka , topics and partitions
2.Discussion of my past projects and choices I took while designing them.

R6- HR
The HR asked few questions that seemed to be out of context. He had lots of attitude and was kind of putting me down. He wanted to know what my parents' occupation was and if I had siblings. All in all this was quite a bad experience. He said they could offer me a compensation that was 3-4 lakhs above my current (which felt unfair. I also had a previous talk with him and he said they could offer me an industry standard).
When he later came back with the offer, It was a bit of an upgrade but I rejected their offer as I started doubting their HR policies at that time and my future at their company.