Years of Experience: 8+ Years
Role: Software Engineer 3
Process: Virtual
Result: Selected

Screening Round [June 2024]
Company recruiter reached out to my via LinkedIn and had requested for my latest resume. Post which he setup 30 minutes call to brief on the process and gather details about my background.

Online Assessment [June 2024]
Recruiter had shared a hackerrank link and asked me to finish the test in next 3 days.
The assessment consisted of two leetcode medium questions. One was on hashmap and other was on arrays.

PSDS [July 2024]
This again happened on hackerrank. There was one base question, and there were follow up questions.
Question: https://leetcode.com/discuss/interview-question/4491846/Wayfair-or-SDE2-L2-4-Onsite-Virtual-or-Coupon-category

Design [July 2024]
This was also on hackerrank. The question was around Hotel Reservation Platform with multiple hotel providers. Was supposed to do white boarding in this one. This was a mix of HLD + LLD
There were multiple follow ups on the base design which appeared as different tabs on the hackerrank portal

Design HLD [July 2024]
I was asked to design Shazam like application with Song identification being a black box for me. The focus was around scaling the app to a very large QPS (one of the follow up question). Since we got some time, the panelist also deep dived into Song identification approach and how would I prepare the data for the same. One of the follow up was also on analytics of this data with some metrics given like Total songs correctly identified in a day, week, month etc.

Hiring Manager [Aug 2024]
These were typical scenario based questions. Fortunately I had a lot of genuine scenarios from my experience to answer those questions so I did not have to cook them up.
There were some questions around leadership, stakeholder management, product lifecycle, SDLC, bringing innovation to solution scenario, people management etc.

All the panelists, including the primary recruiter were very friendly and the rounds very positive.

Post all the rounds, received a call from the recruiter after almost a week that he has very strong positive feedback from all the panelists and he will go ahead and share the offer, post requesting the documents from me.
When I did not agree to what they were offering me [compensation details shared separately], he connected me with his manager (someone very senior from talent acquisition team) and that's where things got messed up. He was a guy I would never want to talk to, he did not know how to talk. He kept on trying to mock me, all of my previous work experiences. He portrayed as if I don't know anything about the tech industry and there's is the best company that exists in this world.
I literally told him in that call that I do not appreciate his tone at all, but he kept on blabbering for more than 40 minutes.

This was a BIG RED Flag for me and decided not to pursue it at all.

They forced me into another HM connect, which I did but still said no.
Cannot sacrifice my peace of mind with the existence of such HR people around.

Compensation Details: https://leetcode.com/discuss/compensation/5684725/Wayfair-or-SE-3-or-Bangalore