Process-
I had applied in April, recruiter reached out to me when July when there was vacancy. I wasn't much prepared but wanted to interview so I went ahead with it. Timeline - Aug 2025

Round 1- (Taken by SSE with exp > 7 yrs)

• Basic introduction
• Trees - maxDepth, leftView, topView [I wrote the code on online compiler then interviewer asked me to open and run on lc, funny enough when i opened the question i could see the solution cached and then i had to quickly erase it and then copy pasted the code I had written :)]

Round 2- (Taken by SSE with exp > 6 yrs)

• Introduction
• General questions about my current product
• Couple of follow up queries on working of current product
• Design LRU cache [Interview was very friendly, I spoke out loud on every bit. Started with brute and then optimized and I made sure to discuss on each part. I even missed couple of details, he pointed it while coding the solution and we kind of solved the problem together.]
• Tech stack, worked on AWS before -> no, etc

Round 3 - (Taken by staff with exp > 10 yrs) (Went for ~90 mins)

• Tell me about yourself
• Explain the high level architecture of current product
• Followups on current product, explain why certain choices used
• Lots of questions from my resume.
• Prev experience with any kind of monitoring tools like Grafana -> no but then i explained what it does and why use it
• Rate limiting, how will you achieve rate limiting
• Any issue encountered in prod due to multithreading issue/deadlock.
• Follow up on solution what are different kinds of locks in java
• Ever used Redis -> no, explained what I know about Redis and cache
• Again some question on resume (i had mentioned migration to jdk17 in my resume) she wanted to know my contribution to it.
• Queries on jenkins from my resume, my contribution.
• On call experience -> no, deployment -> no

The interview kinda went downhill from here

• Sql inner join query :( I was unable to write the query
• Asked to quickly explain the database design for application like quora/medium for 2 things which are feed and notification. I wrote the tables for it but was not sure on whether to use sql or nosql. Although i went with sql since i told the interview if there are no comments, etc with the post we can store it in sql database. Not entirely confident about my choice here.

Self feedback/Overall my pov-
R1 and R2 were easy. I knew R3 would be challenging I even prepared a bit for R3 unlike R1 and R2. Having thorough knowledge/background of the current project is kind of important. I believe chasing hard is not required for Freshworks, doing common mediums and good system design knowledge and good knowledge about product/tech stack should help.

Learnings-

• SQL queries
• Having good understanding of System Design
• Always have backstory prepared for contribution on every part from Resume
• Need to work harder since tech stack is not good and learnings (wrt to System design) are not there.

[Rejected]
Recruiter said feedback was not good for R3 and mentioned points that interviewer gave.

Hope this helps!