I applied to Salesforce in October and initially progressed through the early interview stages. However, in December, a hiring freeze led to a pause in the process, and I did not receive any updates. After reaching out to the recruiter again, I was able to reschedule and complete the final interview loop. (This was for Salesforce US position).

Interview Process

Screening Round w/ Director

Standard behavioral questions and background verification based on my resume.
The hiring manager was satisfied with my experience and moved me to the next round.

HackerRank Online Assessment (60-75 mins)

Two easy/medium LeetCode-style questions.
Topics included Binary Search, Sliding Window, Two Pointers, and Binary Search Trees (BSTs).

Final Interview Loop (4 Rounds)
Round 1: System Design: Resume Grilling + Design Instagram stories/WhatsApp stories for an application.
Discussed functional and non-functional requirements.
Provided a high-level system design, explaining components, trade-offs, and fallback mechanisms.

Round 2: Domain/Architecture: Resume Grilling + Make APIs for an application like Ticketmaster.
Wrote and discussed API flow, backend interactions, request handling, and database integration.

Round 3: Data Structures / OOP Design: Resume Grilling + Medium-level LeetCode question:
https://leetcode.com/problems/group-anagrams/description/
https://leetcode.com/problems/longest-common-prefix/description/

Round 4: Data Structures / OOP Design: Resume Grilling + Easy/Medium-level LeetCode question: Initially planned as a behavioral round with a manager. Instead, the interviewer decided to conduct another coding round focusing on Trie data structure, with the question being similar to the one in Round 3.

Final Outcome
Three days after completing the final round, I received a call from the recruiter informing me that I had not been selected.

Helpful tips: Prepare using a proper curated list like Neetcode 150 and primarily focus on Arrays, Strings, Hashmaps, Sliding Window, and Two-Pointers. Behavioral questions and resume grilling were a big part of the interview and asked in every round. Make sure you are thorough with your resume and can answer any relevant questions related to it. Prepare a few instances from your resume/project experience to narrate your answers in behavioral questions using STAR method. Interviews can be taken in any order and changed randomly, be mentally prepared for the worst. Good Luck!