The verdicts were given to me by the recruiter later. I was interviewed for Staff (L6-2) position.

• Phone Screen (60 mins)
  • 2 Behavioral questions
  • 1 Standard coding question + In-depth discussion on system design aspects of the problem. Typical follow ups like what if we want to distribute this over a fleet of servers etc etc.
• Onsite
  • Bar Raiser
    • In depth conversation related to your experience, design discussions around your projects and a bunch of behavioral questions. They really grill you on your answers, so don't just blabber stuff. Think carefully about what you are saying and be prepared for follow ups. ----- [ Strong Hire ]
  • Coding
    • 2 behavioral questions
    • 1 standard coding question
      • Sort Colors question. He really wanted to me code in one pass without using a map. Even if the time and space complexity was the same for my approach, he wanted me to code in a way he wanted. This seemed a bit weird to me because that really does not test anything apart have you memorized leetcode answer keys. ---- [ Weak Hire :D ]
  • Hiring Manager
    • Similar to Bar raiser round, a bunch of standard behavioral questions. What is the hardest project you have done? Your role? How you resolve conflicts etc etc. The interesting thing here was this interview ended pretty soon. My background and the project I highlight is a research based project and I worked on building the MVP for it. The hiring manager and also the Bar raiser to some extent, were looking for a typical distributed systems project where the challenges are around scale. The project I selected did not have these (I mentioned these explicitly). This project had mostly non-technical challenges which I tried my best to put in a 'Staff' level expectation. The Hiring manager realized this and ended the interview in almost 15 mins. We were just chitchatting for the next 15-20 mins :D ---- [ Strong Hire ]
  • Coding
    • 2 behavioral questions
    • 2 coding questions
      • First question, given networks of 2 friends represented by a grid, find the minimum connections to join these. The statement seems a bit complex, but this is just a simple BFS.
      • We had 15 mins still, so the interviewer gave another problem. Given a grid which contains 1 and 0, find the number of distinct shapes. ---- [ Strong Hire ]
        [1,0,0,0,1,1]
        [1,1,0,0,0,1]
        [0,0,0,0,1,0]
        [0,0,0,0,1,1]
        This returns 2. The first distinct shape is top left representing an 'L' and another is an inverted 'L' on top right.
  • System Design
    • 2 Behavioral questions
    • Design a ride sharing app like Uber. Though the question was straightforward, the interviewer expected far more depth. Looking back, I think I was not able to communicate properly. There was not a lot of conviction in my answers. Extremely disappointed that I messed this up :( ---- [ No / Weak Hire for L6-2 ]

The recruiter mentioned the feedback was mixed and they wanted to take a follow up on System Design. He also mentioned that the Weak Hire on Coding was also a red flag. I guess, if you are unlucky and if you get an interviewer who is not so experienced and does not know what to focus on to get signals in an interview, this could happen.

Follow up System Design

• 2 Behavioral questions
• Design a blob storage like S3. I hadn't looked at such a problem before, so it was challenging but the interviewer was nice. He was course-correcting me whenever I was taking a wrong path. It was indeed a collaboration. We discussed a lot about DynamoDb, how does replication work, how does partioning work in DynamoDb etc. But overall, I did not meet the Staff bar. ----- [ Strong Hire for L6-1 ]

The recruiter reaches out after half hr with a confirmation if I was ok to relocate to Seattle. Once I gave an approval , he gave me a verbal offer.

Just before our call to discuss the offer Recruiter mentions Coupang has paused all offers which require H1 transfer due to Govt Shutdown and uncertainty around 100K fee. This was unfortunate I did not receive the written offer letter. The numbers were very good for Seattle!

Overall, the recruiter was nice to work with. The interviewers were nice to chat with. The last thing left a sour taste in my mouth since no other company I interviewed with mentioned this, so it is hard to believe why Coupang is doing this. Maybe there is some other reason the recruiter does not want to share.

Preparation Post: https://leetcode.com/discuss/post/7368458/coupang-intuit-salesforce-oracle-c3ai-se-n0gq/