**Background**\n- 4 YOE in a product + early stage startup\n- Applied through linkedin, HR reached out after 3 months\n- Location - Bangalore\n\n**HR Call**\nHad a 5-10 min chat with the HR regarding past experience, scale of problems, etc etc and scheduled first round with the Hiring Manager, and was informed that it would be an elimination round.\n\nA few hours before the call was supposed to happen, was informed that the role has closed but there was another team that had an opening, so I would be interviewing with that team\'s HM.\n\n**HM Call (1h)**\nDiscussed the role and expectations, tech stack, past experience, some behavioural questions - vibed well over Elden Ring and similarity of situations faced in the past.\n\nResult - Cleared for next rounds\n\n**System Design Round (1h)**\nWas asked to design a weather management app, goal was to show today\'s weather along with probable forecast for the coming week. Weather and forecast data were to be fetched from multiple 3rd party systems. \n\nHad a good discussion on bottlenecks, scaling, authentication, etc and was able to provide multiple solutions for different levels of scale. IMO, the round went well.\n\n**Coding Round (1h)**\nPrerequisites - You are expected to have an IDE set up with a server + DB connection (any language/DB of your choice) and build APIs.\n\nWas asked to build a Users service which would be used to show user\'s friends that are online, update online/offline status\n- adding a user and updating their online status\n- making one user the friend of another user (user1 and user2 both become friends of each other)\n- an API to fetch user state and all friends along with their online/offline status\n\nUsed Express + MongoDB, and was able to set these APIs up within 45 mins, and answered all follow up questions + discussed how the service would have to be designed to handle scale. Received positive feedback during the round.\n\n**Verdict**\nRejected - Received a mail after 2 days that they decided to move ahead with other candidate.\n\nThis was kind of heartbreaking since I had done really well, vibed with all of the interviewers and had a really great interview experience. \nThe fact that no DSA was asked was a breath of fresh air, and I really really wanted this to go through.

Background\n- 4 YOE in a product + early stage startup\n- Applied through linkedin, HR reached out after 3 months\n- Location - Bangalore\n\nHR Call\nHad a 5-10