I took the interview on the 31st of January after clearing the first stage.

The interviewer was really cool and started off by introducing himself and a bit about what to expect in the interview. One technical question that would involve actual coding and two follow-ups that would require me to explain my thought process. I would later come to understand that these were system design-esque questions.

It was basically Top K Frequent wordedly differently. You have a log dump of visits to a Yelp Business Page. It contains the URL of the page, IP of the visitor and time of visit. Design the signature of the method and any accompaning classes you would need to returnt the top urls as well as the number of visits. No need to consider unique visits. No other constraints.

I quickly coded this up quickly after explaining my thought process and clarifying any other questions I had. I could tell the interviewer was googling some of the methods I was using to check they were correct. The code didn't have to be compile as long as it was syntatically correct.

The follow up was how would I handle scaling the function to fetch the Top K frequent in the last L minutes. This bit was more of a conversation because I wasn't really sure what he was expecting to hear. The main theme was using a Dequeue and he seemed sort of okay with it.

The last question was how I would design a Top K Frequent Microservices Architecture (He didn't ask it like this!!). I pretty much got him to give him the answer this one to which he laughed and said he wouldn't count that answer for me. L.O.L

He ended the interview by saying the System Design part wasn't so important for the Intern position and my performance was good and very methological. But he just had to add that it wasn't the best he had seen. He seemed like a really chill dude though.

At this point I thought I was done. Got a mail from the recruiter that same evening that she had gotten a very positive feedback from the interviewer ( recruiter is in SF and interviewer is in London) and wanted me to schedule a 2-stage final round.