Status: 1 year 4 months of experience as a Backend Software Development Engineer (SDE) at a startup
Position: SDE1
Location: Bangalore

The interview process consisted of three rounds:

Round 1 (DSA):
This round focused on Data Structures and Algorithms. The interviewer asked a couple of medium-level questions from LeetCode. One question was similar to Koko Eating Bananas, which I was able to solve. The second question was related to the sliding window technique. While I wasn't able to implement the solution completely, I was able to explain the approach, and the interviewer was satisfied with that. The round then moved on to questions about DBMS concepts, specifically focusing on database locking.

Round 2 (Low-Level Design - LLD):
This round was scheduled for 1.5 hours but extended to 2 hours. The interviewer shared a Java-based inventory management application with some missing methods and bugs. I was asked to identify and fix the bugs first. After that, I implemented the missing methods as requested. Once the basic implementation was complete, the interviewer asked me to optimize the algorithms. We also had a brief discussion on database locking during this round.

Round 3 (Hiring Manager Round):
Scheduled for 1.5 hours, this round began with introductions and a discussion about my current tech stack at the company. We then delved into a detailed conversation about database locking and query optimization. The interviewer asked about the @Transaction annotation in Spring Boot and followed up with questions on SOLID principles and design patterns.

Verdict: Selected