I recently interviewed for the SDE-2 position at Dream11, and the process was thorough, with five rounds in total. The first two rounds were conducted virtually, and upon clearing them, I was invited to Dream11’s Mumbai office for the remaining three rounds. Dream11 took care of all travel arrangements, including flight tickets and cab transportation, making the experience smooth and well-organized. Here’s a breakdown of each round and my experience:

Round 1: Data Structures and Algorithms (DSA)

• Overview : This round focused on DSA concepts, where I was asked to solve 2 problems within a limited time (1h).

• Problems :
  *Problem 1: This question involved using maps, where the key was a string and the value was a list. The solution required using binary search to find the answer. Had to implement binary search myself.(using upper_bound or lower_bound was not encouraged.)

  *Problem 2: Given a numeric string and a number 𝐾, the task was to remove 𝐾
  digits from the string so that the resulting number would be the smallest possible.

• Difficulty : Easy

• Experience : This was a straightforward DSA round, and the interviewers were supportive and provided helpful hints as needed.

Round 2: Database

• Overview : The recruiter mentioned that this round would focus on database concepts and a deep dive into my resume. The interviewer would explore my past experiences, delve into my design choices, and thoroughly examine the tech stack I used in previous projects.

• Problems : Interviewers asked to describe the project I am currently working on, they wanted to understand the design choices you made, asked question around why a particular tech stack was chosen. There were question around postgres concurrency control , isolation levels , locks , replication , how would you scale postgres reads and writes. Some questions around reactive stack , how netty and r2dbc works. They also asked me the classic question , how would you implement book my show ticket booking feature on scale. How would you make a sure if a person selects a seat others are not able to see it.

• Difficulty : Medium

• Experience : I have never experienced such a interview round taken by any company, Interviewers kept me on the edges and I got a feeling if I messed up any of the questions, they had the technical expertise to grill me hard on the topic.

Round 3: HLD

• Overview : This was a high-level design round aimed at assessing my system design skills. The interviewer, a senior engineer with over four years of experience at Dream11, guided the discussion.

• Problems : I was told to design a alerting and monitoring system like prometheus and grafana. The expectation was to first define scope of the system NFR's and FR's, estimate scale and database storage layer, Consistency vs Availability discussion. How will timeseries data be stored and in what format. When a new pod comes up how will prometheus server know that we have to start scraping metrics from this pod. There were dicussions around how will you maintain active web connection with so many clients at the same time to scrape metrics.

• Difficulty : Hard

• Experience : This was a fun round, discussions were mostly open ended and they were just judging you on your ability to think about solution and pros and cons of each approach , challenging questions were asked to judge your technical skills. Interviewers were also helpful if you get struck on the problem statement.

Round 4: Hiring Manager

• Overview : This round was taken by a vice president of dream 11 who has been working in dream 11 for more than 8 years.

• Problems : Question was asked around your previous work experience, certain scenario based questios like

1. IPL is coming how would you prep your system so that everything runs smoothly.
2. Explain SDLC process you follow to develop a feature.
3. What's the most challenging problem you have solved in Navi. What was your contribution in it.
4. How do you keep yourself you to update with new technologies.
5. What's the procedure you follow to solve any incident/bug in your company.
6. Certain questions based on my resume were asked.

• Experience : He was a very humble person and just wanted to understand my mindset and If I were to put in some challenging situation how would I handle it. This was a roughly 40-45 minute discussion and no technical questions were asked.

Round 5: HR

• Overview : This was taken by a very experience HR, with over 13 years of experience.

• Problems : The HR round included common questions, with a focus on getting to know my background more personally. She asked about my childhood, schooling, college experiences, and how I developed an interest in coding. We also discussed my reasons for wanting to leave my current company and my perspective on the people I currently work with. Additionally, she presented a few scenario-based questions to understand my approach in various situations like

1. Tell me a situation where you went above and beyond to complete a task.
2. If I call your manager today what are your strengths and weeknesses he would tell me.
3. Tell me a situation where you failed but It proved out to be a blessing in disguise.

• Experience : This was also a overall fun round, we had a discussion for round 40-45 minutes and she ended up telling me the places I should visit in mumbai before I leave for bangalore.

Two days after the interview, I received an email requesting documentation. I'm currently in the salary negotiation phase, and I'll provide a detailed breakdown of the compensation package once it's finalized.

Hope this experience helps you in cracking interviews. Thanks for reading.