pre-interview: cold mailed a Agoda recruiter
prior experience: ~4yoe, SDE2 at one of FAANG
1st Round: Coding
https://leetcode.com/problems/minimum-window-substring/description/
Solved this using brute force approach first and gradually kept applying various optimisations to drive the discussion. The interviewer seemed satisfied with the approach.
This round lasted for about 45 minutes. It was supposed to be 60 minutes but seemed like interviewer was satisfied on all his parameters and finished early.
2nd Round: Architecture
Was asked to design a system to display the top K trending hotels. Used the top-K heavy hitters approach with a performant aproach that uses some approximation to provide a non-deterministic result using count min sketch algorithm, the idea basically was to built a funnelled pipeline with some sort of aggregation happening at each stage before the actual counting happens, so that at each stage the traffic we are dealing with is progressively reduced.
The slow but most accurate & deterministic approach was similar to how batched MapReduce works. I explained both of them, their pros & cons, the tradeoffs and when to use which.
This round lasted for 60 minutes.
https://www.youtube.com/@SystemDesignInterview/videos - this channel is really good for broad system design problems.
3rd round: platform round
This round had 2 halves.
The first half consisted of 2 coding questions, where the interviewer expected mostly pseudocode.
The first question was to search in a row wise sorted matrix. I started with the naive solution first and then progressed to a more optimal solution using binary search.
He asked me questions on the time & space complexity which I answered, then he gave me another follow up to the question(which I forgot). I answered the follow up as well. Slightly fumbled a bit while give the time & space complexity , but managed to answer it.
The second half of the interview , he basically asked various system design & database design questions based on various given situations, this was a very interesting round & we had a nice discussion around various choices of infrastructure & design choices & their respective tradeoffs. I felt this pattern was quite similar to what Karat does.
4th round: HM
This round was taken by a Sr. EM at Agoda, and it was a short call of around 30 mins where he discussed my current roles & responsibilities , my future aspirations, what I am looking for in a company, etc, etc.
The entire process happened across 3 months & I finally got the offer. Will update the numbers shortly.
