Round 1 – DSA

They threw Palindrome Partitioning II and Maximum Candies Allocated to K Children at me.
Solved, moved on. Standard Leetcode.

Round 2 – Technical

• Redshift vs RDS vs Athena
• Why partitioning is evil
• Lambda concurrency
• EC2 vs Lambda
• Microservice service discovery, retries, intermediate storage
• SQL vs NoSQL sermon: schema, ACID, scalability.
• Java trivia grenades: break a singleton, polymorphism, where static vars live, serialization, stack memory.

Round 3 – System Design

Design a Service Discovery system in 45 minutes. Requirements:

• Register/unregister services
• Track all instances
• Detect dead ones, reroute traffic
• Load balance magically

Follow-up:

• Register at service or instance level?
• How to handle new instance?
• How to kill a dead one?
• How do dependencies discover each other?

Round 4 – Hiring Manager

Behavioral questions:

• "What if you have conflicts with your manager?"
• "If attrition happens, how do you support your manager?"

LLD: Design an Airplane Reservation System with multiple airlines,
users should select dynamically. At this point, I was already done.

HR said "Feedback is positive, but position already filled 🤡"
Also HR: "We’ll check with other managers, maybe one more round."

Takeaway: They aren’t hiring engineers, they’re hiring yes-men.
Better to stay away.