I directly applied on their career website for Member of Technical Staff (Java Backend) position. It was for the platform organisation in the event notification team. After almost a week, I received a call from the recruiter stating that they would like to move forward with my candidacy. The first round was scheduled after 4 days.

Round 1 - Technical Interview (60 minutes)

The interviewer was a Lead Member of Technical Staff. It got stretched to 75 minutes. It was a mix of technical questions and 2 DSA problems. In the end, I asked about the team structure and what work they were doing. Although I was able to think of the correct approach for the first DSA problem (similar to LC 84. Largest Rectangle in Histogram problem), I had some bugs while coding. Otherwise, overall, it was good. The interviewer was very helpful and kind.

Technical Questions:

1. How to prevent race conditions during concurrent updates?
2. N + 1 problem in Hibernate.
3. Transactional annotation isolation levels.
4. Eager initialisation and lazy initialisation.
5. Internal working of HashMap.
6. Design Patterns - Builder, Singleton.
7. Project high-level architecture.
8. Kafka-related

DSA

1. https://www.hackerearth.com/community/practice/thief-and-warehouses-6ebf4e07/

2. https://www.hackerearth.com/practice/basic-programming/implementation/basics-of-implementation/practice-problems/algorithm/alice-and-string-game-dbd6adc3/

I got a call from the recruiter coordinator in a few hours that I cleared the 1st round and wanted to ask about my availability for the 2nd round. It was scheduled for 2 days later.

Round 2 - Technical Interview (60 minutes)

The interviewer was a Principal Member of Technical Staff. He had 15 years of experience in the same company. It was an open-ended yet challenging round focused on design. We began with each other's introductions and then talked about things outside resume. Then he gave a problem to design. Design a basic calculator to perform on huge numbers, where each number can go up to billions or trillions. We talked about storing blobs in S3, chunking file content, FFT, quantum computing, JDK, blocking and non-blocking i/p, o/p, async API, SNS, Kafka Topic, virtual threads and more. This round really pushed me out of my comfort zone.

I got a call from the recruiter coordinator after a couple of days that I had progressed to the next round, which would be managerial. It was scheduled for 4 days later.

Round 3 - Managerial Round (60 minutes)

This interview was taken by a Senior Manager of Engineering who was the Hiring Manager for the team. I was asked a bunch of behavioural questions, and in the end, he spoke in depth about the team structure, work policies, product, which I am going to work on, and what the expectations would be from an ideal candidate. The manager was very friendly and sound technically and product-wise as well.

1. What is the most complex project you have worked on? Deep dive a little bit into it.
2. What would you do when you raise a PR and the reviewer comments change that could not work in your case?
3. How are things different back when you joined the company and presently?
4. How do you handle a situation where your idea and your manager's idea on developing a solution are different?
5. Some other standard behavioural questions and based on my projects from my resume.

After 3 days, I got an email from the recruiter to send the required documents and details to generate the offer. Side by side got another email for the BGV process as well.

Round 4 - HR Round (30 minutes)

The recruiter called after around 10 days from the previous email to have an HR discussion regarding interview experience, and bit on background, role, company policies and the offer proposal. The entire process took around 45 days.

Offer: https://leetcode.com/discuss/post/7195743/athenahealth-mts-java-backend-offer-by-a-j2d4/