Background

Current Role: SDE-2
Current Company: The D.E Shaw Group

Interview Experience:

Round 1 (Screening Round) -

1. Medium DSA question - https://leetcode.com/problems/maximum-subarray/description/
2. Difference between Abstraction and Encapsulation. Explain with examples in JAVA.
3. Private Constructor implementation in JAVA.
4. OOPS principles, SOLID principles in JAVA.
5. Basics of DB, APIs and JAVA questions.

Round 2 -
This round was conducted by one of the founding members of the startup. It lasted for around 30 minutes with focus on my previous work experiences. Topics covered were:

1. Kafka Basics
2. APIs, Rest, OAuth, Encryption, Security management in an application.
3. GraphQL schema, Schema management, Stitching keys etc.

Round 3 -

This round was also conducted by one of the founding members of the startup. It lasted for around an hour.

1. GraphQL vs REST - detailed questionnaire
2. Low Level Design of Cricbuzz - Functional + Non-functional requirements, Data modelling etc.
3. Was also asked few design pattern implementations for above design - Factory, state, observer, strategy etc.
4. HLD of Cricbuzz - Scaling, Read v/s write operations on DB, consistency and ordering guarantees, Latency, Event management through Kafka, Redis Cache, Real time delivery to users.
5. Following up on same design, he asked tradeoffs between SQL and NoSQL and which DB to choose here.

Even though, I fumbled on multiple places between tradeoffs, he was quite satisfied with my overall approach and gave a healthy feedback.

Verdict - Selected