MS in CS in Top 20 US Schools, 15 YOE
Position: Really not sure whether it was E5/E6. I see people here mentioning it - but the exact Position was not mentioned. Recruiter seemed to say it was dependent on Interview performance and hence didn't push it much
Location: New York
LC: 100+ (So a beginner) but targeted FB Questions
Phone screen: 1 Medium LC on Stacks, 1 array question not in LC
Virtual Onsite: 4 rounds
Coding 1: 1 Medium LC - missed one cue and I think this led to the downfall. The interviewer seemed to be copying and executing to verify, and with the blunder I made, that wouldn't even have been necessary. Had a bad start.
Behavioral: It was surprising that they had a very less experienced engineer(checked from Linkedin profile) do this round, esp. when asking ques about strategy, project planning,etc. Personally felt, a more experienced person would be able to judge this round better
Coding 2: 1 Medium LC - did well, but interviewer wanted me to write the optimized solution. Hence discussing all possible solutions took away most of the time. The interviewer seems to be knowing what he wanted. So though I was expecting 2 questions, most of the time was initially spent in discussing before I wrote the code
Product Architecture: A general question - not seen in gg or in Sysdesign Primer. I think I did just ok here - I had gone through Sysdesign primer, and gg , was able to give a high level tech overview too, but may be the interviewer had a completely different solution in mind. With the interview being virtual, and though 1 hour (15 min buffer) was allocated, interviewer was in a rush even before 45 minutes were complete. May be didn't like my approach. I have not pursued conventional approaches in my career either. So not worried
Preparation:
LC
gg SysDesign interview
gg Behavioral interview
SysDesign Primer
Gaurav Sen Youtube videos on Sysdesign
Few other Youtube videos on SysDesign
Udemy courses on Data Structures and Algorithms
Cracking the Coding Interview by Gayle(skimmed through)