Before others ask me in comment, let me tell it myself

• Saw a post on Linkedin that GP is hiring, and applied via that referral from linkedin
• No OA round direct interview call
• Compensation range recruiter gave me : 28-32 lpa base (depending on interview) for SDE2

About Me : 3+ YoE | Tier 3 college | FAANG

1st round (HM cultural fit+ little techno fit round, some EM from Poland)

< No discussion from resume, just trying to gauge what type of person I'm >

0. Why do you want to join GP, can you work in remote env
1. Describe what type of person you are in 5 points (both tech & personal life) & what you do in your free time i.e. hobbies etc
   1.1 <sir bachpan se bas ghis hi rahe hai to itna sochne ke time hi nhi mila
2. Let suppose you're hiring an intern, what things you will look
   3. Told few points and at also told him that even if he applying for intern a little bit of design pattern knowledge is good
3. What is your favourite design pattern & What is SOLID
4. Explain me abstraction in 1 sentence
5. What bothers you the most + have you failed anytime in deliverying the project
6. How do you handle rejection
7. Serverless and standard architecture pros and cons (as GP is fully serverless)

2nd (DSA) and 3rd (LLD) round (Cakewalk)

Minimun station required for train given arrival and departure time
Some adhoc easy implementation question of arrays

15 mins on resume dicussion, then an LLD question (fairly easy, but did some mistakes of not working on SOLID design due to lack of practice)
Different HTTP request (GET, POST etc) difference between PUT & PATCH
Query params and request params in URL & when to use what
when do you send data in body instead of writing it in query/request params

4th Final round (Dir of Engg) [reminds me of AIB honest campus placement last round]

• Started with my resume, asked how I did that thing in the project

  • I told I used redis. Follow up (which data structure you used in redis) what different types it can support

• Do you know about serverless (I told ya i know a little bit)

  • Cold start problem of serverless
  • Question on AWS lambda (like handling concurrency, cold start, how you will monitor lambdas)

• Do you know anything about DynamoDB (I said no, so moved on to next set of questions)

• Have you worked on REST APIs, & different HTTP request (GET, POST etc) difference between PUT & PATCH (again same question). Also have you worked on authorisation/authentication system (I told NO)

Then he started with HLD discussion

(Q.1) Difference between authentication and authorisation and a question on how you will design (HLD) system which can do authentication and authorisation
- As I have literally never worked on any authentication/authorisation system, so I was just trying to make few things, I was talking about sessions vs JWT based authentication & was designing the same. But stopped me in between & told me this is not he was looking for
- I did something else, he kept correction me & he told me if I can you design it using serverless architecture. I have very little idea on serverless so couldn't so moved to next question

He was like, abhi reject to tu ho gaya hai lekin ab me tere maze lunga

(Q.2) Suppose you want to make a document upload service (only 2 usecase, upload and fetch document for different user), design HLD and can you use AWS services while designing

• I fucked up here, asked few requirement & jumped directly to HLD without discussion on API or anything else
• He stopped me in between & told what all APIs you will support like (GET /all-document/:userID etc etc)
• Then I draw some boxes & straight lines (lol) and used aws services like API gateway, S3, Dynamo, EC2 (obviously for servers)
• What all things will you monitor (like EACH & EVERY things to monitor, Dynamo CPU utilisation, S3 what will u monitor)
• Again a follow up question, how will you handle authentication and authorisation [-_-]
• Also can you make the design using serverless instead of EC2 (-_-)
• Also, a follow up on how AWS API gateway works (I told client will connect to this, it can support many features like rate limiting, rerouting request etc.., then he told me, that I know "HOW WILL you implement all those in API gateway. I told him I have never worked on API gateway but I know the basics functionality of it)

(Q. 3) How you will choose the database, when you will choose RDBMS vs NoSQL

• I told ACID. He told except ACID what other criteria is there (also asked a quesiton that you want ACID then only you will choose RDBMS & for every other you will use NoSQL, right? )
• Why NoSQL are more scalable (I started discussing desing like how cassandra has multiple nodes so its horizontally scalable)
• Then he stopped me that he don't want to discuss about architecture etc, why NoSQL are scalable in general (I was like hmmm)
• Then not sure but I told sharding, follow up on what's sharding, why SQL cannot shard and NoSQL can shard etc
• I told that because of single node DB is limited to underlying hardware (RAM and HD) so we have to go for horizontal scaling
• A follow up, suppose there is no limit on hardware (can have 10 TB of RAM hypothetically) then we will always be using RDBMS, right? (I was like, yaaahh kind of). Then he told Ok, then its almost time

Do you have any question for me, I asked few questions

Conclusion

• Tbh the dude was smart and have build things from scratch, otherwise many DOE don't have such indepth knowledge about tech
• Also it was my first HLD round after years, so I fucked up & I never revised AWS (but I'm upset that he asked things that was not even in my resume like API gateway implementation and Authenticaiton/Authorisation system)

I was so eager to join GP, was even ready to compromise on my pay, after that interview I was so upset that didn't eat much in lunch & dinner & was left with no motivation to prepare for others upcoming interview (took me 3 days to recover)
Guys if you know any other remote company currently hiring, please comment, I'm mostly looking for remote jobs due to personal+family reasons