Background
Education: Computer Science from a Tier1 institute
Current Status: 2 yrs of Full time experience at a big tech company
Position Interviewed For: Software Engineer
Interview : June 2024

Process
Recruiter reached out to me after viewing my profile on Naukri for a Software Engineer position and sent a test link with a 3-day deadline.

Assessment: The test had 2 questions:
DSA (Medium, well-known pattern): Similar to the "minimum number of meeting rooms required."
REST and JavaScript (Medium): Given an API schema, I was asked to write code to fetch data and do some processing on it.
Solved both questions successfully.

Technical Rounds (3 rounds, eliminative)
After around 2-3 weeks, the recruiter reached out to schedule the next rounds.

Round 1: DSA (1 hour)

Questions:

1. https://leetcode.com/problems/last-stone-weight/description/
2. A medium difficulty question on the sliding window pattern.
   Outcome: Successfully completed; recruiter scheduled the next round after a few days.

Round 2: DSA (1 hour)

This round was intended as a design interview but was changed to DSA due to some misunderstanding from interviewer.
Questions:

1. A medium sliding window question.
2. Another medium question: Given two arrays representing the cost of scheduling interviews for candidates at City A and City B, find the minimum total cost while scheduling an equal number of interviews in each city.

Cleared the round; the recruiter scheduled the third round.

Round 3: Managerial Interview (1 hour)
Focus: Behavioral and situational questions, particularly about my current work and problem-solving approach.
Sample Questions:
How would I debug a problem?
How would I start a project from scratch?
How would I approach implementing a feature?
Outcome: The feedback was positive, with the interviewer sharing encouraging remarks at the end.

Recruiter stopped attending my calls after a day and after few days she called back saying that the feedback was positive but the manager went ahead with another candidate. But she told that she has another opening in some other team and I went ahead

Round 4 - Managerial ROund(Different team)
Interviewer was very good, after introductions, he asked some questions based on Resume and then asked me to explain our product. While explaining he took a particular usecase and gave some challenges there like how I would design that feature and what I would do If I had to scale it to a large customer base. This Round went good. Asked me about why I am looking for a change and other followup questions. Even here the feedback was good when I asked the interviewer

Recruiter again ghosted me this time as well

After 3 weeks she picked up the call by mistake and told that even this opening was given to some other candidate and there was no negative feedback here as well