Interview Rounds
Round 1 – Engineering Manager Round
Deep dive into resume & projects
Design trade-offs and real-world decision making
Java (in-depth)
Synchronization, Reentrant Locks
Pros & cons of synchronization with real-world examples
Core Java
OOP concepts
String vs StringBuilder vs StringBuffer
Immutability, String Pool, String.intern()
Design Patterns
Factory Pattern – use cases, advantages & disadvantages
Databases
SQL vs NoSQL trade-offs
Indexing (deep dive)
Normalization (all types)
When & why to use denormalization
Project discussion
Metrics & performance follow-ups
Observability
Logs, metrics, tracing
Cloud
Azure services used in projects
Round 2 – Technical Round
DSA
Merge Sort (implementation)
Java / Java 8
Can we insert null in HashSet?
Interface evolution problem → avoiding changes in 100 implementations (default methods)
Spring Boot
Internals
@Qualifier vs @Primary (how & when to use)
SQL
Indexing concepts
Query to find N-th highest salary
System & API Design
REST API design
Scalability discussions
Databases
Design and performance trade-offs
Team discussion
Team structure & expectations
Round 3 – Principal Engineer Round
Resume & project discussion (~30 mins)
High-level system design (~45-60 mins)
URL Shortener
Follow-ups on:
Architecture choices
Scalability
Tech stack decisions (what to use / what not to)
Verdict :- Selected
