YOE: 4.5
Applied on careers portal, recruiter reached out directly for a Drive and informed they'll take 3 rounds on the same day based on feedbacks of each round & final round with director will be scheduled on some other day. Each round was for an hour.
Round 1: DSA
2 questions were asked which I had to code on my own IDE and run with custom inputs. 1st question was a medium sliding window question & 2nd was a medium binary tree question. Solved both within 30 mins. Interviewer then asked another hard binary tree question & just asked for the approach.
Then some discussion on LFU.
Self verdict: Strong Hire
Received positive feedback & 2nd round was scheduled in next hour
Round 2: DSA + System Design
The interviewer shared a hackerrank link with a DSA question. It was a medium question, which can be done with & without stack as well(balanced parenthesis variation).
All testcases passed then we moved on to System design where she asked to design Goodreads. Main focus was on relationship between entities & db schemas & querying. Had a good discussion but we ran out of time.
Lastly she asked few scenario based question on multithreading which were easy.
Self verdict: Hire
Hiring manager round was scheduled within the next 15 mins.
Round 3: Hiring Manager
This round also went on for an hour. Discussed previous projects, challenges, tradeoffs. Some behavioural questions. This round also went well.
Self Verdict: Hire/ Strong Hire
Recruiter then reached out that they've scheduled the last round with director late in the evening (7 to 8). Even though I was exhausted I went ahead with it.
Round 4: Director
This round did not go as expected at all. Director joined & directly jumped on to questions without even introduction. The questions were not behavioural nor something I was prepared for, they were mostly on experiences like what do you see when you review a PR/Design document. I could not make up the answers at that time so I answered honestly whatever came to my mind based on my experience but he did not seem satisfied & even smirked for few of the answers that I gave.
In depth discussion on RabbitMQ, interal working & mostly on handling failures. I explained everything like requeue,retries,deadletter queues etc. but he kept on following up with what if this also fails. After a point I went blank for few questions. Last 5 mins he asked expectations & some basic behavioural questions.
Final verdict: Rejected
Tried reaching out to the recruiter for feedback but they are not responding.
Other interview experience: https://leetcode.com/discuss/post/6956018/servicenow-interview-experience-ic-2-gho-l93i/