About me
3 Months fulltime SWE experience at a big bank. Had an 8 month internship during college. At time of interview, I had done 90 LeetCode questions. Further prep came in the form of watching all of Guarav's System Design Videos on YouTube, and Dan Croiter's Behavioral prep videos also on YouTube. Probably spent in total a week on both of those (together, not separately).
OA
For the OA I got Critical Routers and Most Common Word. Failed some hidden cases for Critical Routers, actually failed one of the two visible cases for Most Common Word. Somehow got passed.
Virtual Onsite
Round 1
Hiring Manager. This round started with probably 40 minutes of digging into my resume, so not really LP questions exactly but all behavioral. Then I had maybe 12 minutes to design dropbox, and the remaining time I was able to ask questions. My design was weak, but also I was very thrown as it didn't seem like I was getting much feedback on whether my choices were good or bad.
Round 2
This round was around 5 to 10 minutes of LP and then OO Design. I had to design an airport and fulfill 3 desired API contracts. Was honestly pretty easy and the interviewer was very talkative. I code out loud and this was key, because if you say something dumb it is mostly very hard to not tell that the interviewer thinks it's a bad idea. Saves yourself from doing too far down a dead-end road. I finished in around 40 minutes, so I had about ten minutes to ask the interviewer questions.
Round 3
This round started rough. Immediately was asked how hashmap's worked under the hood in detail, and honestly beats me bro lmao. I was able to discuss how they are implemented with dynamic lists and all that but had no recollection of how collision resolution works. I ended up somehow mentioning consistent hashing and luckily the interviewer perked up at that, and was satisfied as I explained it in detail. After all this (probably ten minutes), I was given this question to solve. Wasn't so bad, I had the intuition immediately and spent around 35 minutes coding. I has a miss-step here and there but the interviewer was quick to stop me from going down a bad path, again because I code out-loud. Remainder of time was left for questions.
Round 4
This round I think was with the bar raiser? I honestly have no clue if this was it or not. But it started with 15-20 minutes of pretty grueling LP, and then I was given a question I couldn't find on Leetcode. It was like this but with an extra twist making it harder. I solved it pretty quick to the interviewer's satisfaction, and then I got to ask questions for the remaining ten or so minutes.
Post Virtual Onsite
A couple days later I was contacted for a phone call with a recruiter, and they let me know I got the offer. However, they chose to offer me SDE1 and not SDE2. If I had to guess about any one thing that caused this, I'm sure that'd be my weak system design. I'm just happy to have the position, though! Because I was downleveled I still need to get placed with a team so no talk of compensation yet.