Status: 6 YOE in a good MNC.

Applied through careers website, got a mail from the HR.
Initial discussion with HR on the work, role, benefits etc., I'm told I'm being interviewed for SE2 or SSE1, based on the performance corresponding role will be provided.

In total there are 3 technical (1hr each) and 1 PM round apart from HR discussions.
All the tech rounds follows the format - Theoretical questions and questions on some design considerations, followed by a coding question in last 20mins on coderpad.

Tech Round - 1:

1. Questions on CI, CD.
2. Factors to be considered while starting to work on a project (Basically work flow. Start with design, HLD, LLD -> DB estimates -> Performance characterisation -> Implementation (Logging, Metrics) -> Deployment -> Monitoring -> Alerting)
3. Few more subjective questions, not able to recollect right now. As soon as I find some will edit this and update.
4. Coding question - OCR recognises Strings written and unable to recognise some characters properly. After some processing you get Strings like S1 -> "A3BCD" which is equivalent to A***BCD (3 unknown characters which can be anything). Given two such strings, identify if they can be equal. For example A3BCD is equal to A6 or A3BC1 etc.,. (I provided solution by exploding the string. Replacing the numbers with those many blank characters, interviewer said this definitely works but not optimal - I'm assuming he expected a two pointer approach where each pointer points to each String and iterate)

Tech Round - 2:

1. Similar format as above, but questions were based on design and deployment
2. What are some disadvantages of Microservices
3. Micro Service 1 has a database1 and MS2 has DB 2. MS1 should update some entries in DB and communicate MS2 for some work. If MS2 is unreachable how do you restore previous state.
4. Coding question - https://leetcode.com/problems/maximum-subarray/ (with O(1) space)

After two tech rounds, had a call with HR to discuss on cost of living at Berlin, how to come up with expected Salary etc. HR was patient enough explaining every detail.

Product Manager Round (30mins):

1. Give me an example of some decisions you made at your work.
2. Why do you use Kafka, what benefits it provides.

Bar Raiser (Tech Round - 3)

1. What is CORS
2. How do you secure a REST API and how do you authenticate it.
3. Give me an example where you identified a bug in your system and how did you mitigate
4. Some questions on the product I work on
5. Coding question: Count the total number of words in a given String, write test cases for it.

Overall process was smooth, HR was approachable and all the interviewers were friendly. Hoping for a positive result. Fingers crossed!

Let me know if you have any specific questions in the comments sections, let's discuss! :D