I recently appeared for the MTS-2 (Member of Technical Staff) role at Adobe. The interview process consisted of four rounds:

Round 1: Problem-Solving & Data Structures
This round primarily focused on my ability to solve algorithmic problems efficiently.

Problem Statement: Given a table with employee names, their manager’s name, and their salaries, write a program to retrieve the names of all employees reporting to a given manager.

My Approach: I solved this problem using BFS (Breadth-First Search) to traverse the hierarchy efficiently.

Follow-up Questions:

• How does this problem compare to Tree vs. Graph representation?
• What is the fundamental difference between a Tree and a Graph?
• What is the time complexity of both approaches, and when should we prefer a Tree vs. a Graph in real-world scenarios?

Performance: I was able to answer all the questions, and overall, I felt this round went well.

Round 2: Low-Level Design (LLD)

• This round assessed my ability to design systems with a structured approach.
• The interviewer started by asking how my previous rounds went to ease into the discussion.
• LLD of one of my past projects: I explained the architecture and design decisions I made.
• Design an Elevator System: A unique aspect of this question was that the lift could be operated from outside by selecting a floor number.
• Database selection: The interviewer emphasized choosing the database first before proceeding with the design.
• The primary focus of this round was on how well I broke down the problem into components and structured my approach.

Round 3: Managerial Round

• This round was primarily a deep dive into my professional experience and past projects.
• The interviewer asked a lot of questions about my current company and the work I have done there.
• We had detailed discussions about the projects I have worked on, both in my current and previous roles.

Round 4: Director Round
This round was more challenging, with in-depth technical grilling. The interviewer did not turn on the camera, making it slightly impersonal.

• Project Discussion:
• The interviewer extensively questioned me about the projects I had worked on, especially the algorithms used behind the scenes.
• One of my major projects was related to Secret Vault, so I was asked:
  * "How would you design a Secret Vault from scratch?"
  * "What encryption and decryption algorithms are used?"
  * "Which is more secure—Asymmetric or Symmetric encryption?"

Resilience in Microservices:
Since microservice resilience was part of my work, I was asked to explain how to ensure resilience in microservices.

Coding Problem:
I was asked to implement LCA (Lowest Common Ancestor) for an N-ary Tree.
I solved it using a non-optimal approach by maintaining two lists and finding the path from the root to the given nodes.
The interviewer noted that my approach was not the most efficient but did not provide any direct feedback at that moment.

Unexpected Question:
After the technical questions, the interviewer mentioned that he would ask a few non-evaluative questions.

• He asked, "What if you were allowed to cheat in an interview? and would u use ChatGPT or Google"
• I responded honestly that I would probably use Google for quick references.
• He then asked, "Why Google?" and I provided my reasoning.
• At the end, he mentioned that I was the only candidate who hadn't implemented an efficient algorithm for the LCA problem. He said he "liked that about me"—but I couldn’t tell whether he was being genuine or sarcastic.