Interviewing for Role

Lead Software Engineer | Bengaluru | December 2023

Current Stats

Status: Lead Engineer at B2B based startup
Location: Bengaluru

Interview process:

Round-1: Technical Round 
a. Video call with Lead Engineer
b. General tech discussion on Golang fundamentals, etc.
c. Deep discussion on Database locking constructs, Golang concurrency constructs
c. Design solution for handling seat booking for BookMyShow 
d. Time taken: 60 mins

Round-2: Technical Interview -- Technical Round
a. Interview call with one of their Engineers.
b. Design Rate limiter, how to handle if you cannot use any central storage system.
c. Question on Circuit breaker and its uses
d. Time taken: 45 mins

Round-3: Technical Interview -- Technical Round -- Onsite interview
a. Interview call with the Director of Engineering
b. Little deep dive into Recent work projects.
c. Design BookMyShow -- 
	* Scale for 100K TPS.
	* Schema design, HLD, 
	* What if tickets booking for PVR owned theaters happens from PVR systems rather than in-house systems ?
	* How to solve heap crash in pod when filtering and sorting of Movie List ?
	* How to prevent overbooking of seats ?
d. Time taken: 90 ~ 105 mins

Round-4 Technical Interview -- Technical Round -- Onsite Interview
a. Interview call with Assistant director of Engineering.
b. Explain and implement Builder pattern.
c. Design database schema of IRCTC system.
d. Questions around REST Api design.
e. Questions around Distributed systems -- How to promote follower to leader without side-effects, How to sync re-animated leader
f. Questions around Dependency inversion and database query patterns.
g. Time taken: 60 mins

Verdict: [Cleared all the interview processes but kept me waiting for more than 3 weeks and then ghosted me :(]

Take-aways:

• Need to brush on low level concepts such as design patterns, SQL statements query syntaxes, REST style Api patterns,
• Also, need to brush up on Coding Design patterns and what is the purpose of each pattern.

Update: 27/12/2023:

• Got to know from 3rd party recruiter that they would be letting me know the result by EOW.
• I guess they are probably interviewing other candidates, seeing who fits better and for whom they would need to pay less
  compensation.
• Little bit disappointed at this kind of behavior. But no choice other than to wait. :)

Update: 29/12/2023:

• Got to know from 3rd party recruiter that they would be letting me know the result by next week.
• I feel that they probably have rejected but not yet disclosing it for unknown reasons.
• Very frustrated at this point of time. But no choice to move forward. :(

Update: 5/1/2024:

• On 3rd Jan, HR of Junglee games contacted me and got all relevant details about current comp, notice period.
• No reply from them till today. No response on pinging in Whatsapp as well.
• Either the process is very slow, they are hedging their bets with other candidates or something else.
• Not sure what to do now. Assuming that they have ghosted me completely.

Update: 9/1/2024:

• 3rd party recruiter reached out to me today saying that they are willing to offer me role of an SDE-3 but the compensation I have
  mentioned was a little bit too much for that role.
• Responded saying that I was willing to negotiate on the compensation part as their work profile was good.
• They said they would get back to me within the End of the week.

Update: 16/1/2024:

• No call since then.
• Looks like they kept just like an option rather than a serious candidate to pursure.
• Decided to move on from this opportunity.