YOE: 9+
Current Company : Oracle Cloud Infra
College : Tier 2
Location: Bangalore, India
Current title - PMTS
Total Rounds: 7 onsite rounds
Not going to disclose exact question due to NDA
Onsite 1 - Coding
Medium level complexity questions based on Map and Double Linked List. Not on leetcode.
Was asked two questions in this round. Second was extention of the first
Feedback - Hire
Onsite 2 - Coding
Q1. Question based on DFS + Graph. Medium level complexity. Not on leetcode.
Q2. Extension to Q1.
Solved Q1 in no time. In Q2, interviewer confused me, he asked me to come up with data structures for Q2, but it was actually a LLD question, which was told to me in the last 10 minutes. Coded whatever I can, quicky in 5 minutes.
Feedback : Lean to hire.
Onsite 3 - Coding
Q1. LC Easy based on binary search.
Q2. 2D matrix questions related to rotated arrays.
Solved both questions in 35 minutes.
Feedback: Strong hire
Onsite 4 - Behavior
Standard questions.
Onsite 5- System Design
Interviewer was not friendly. He was not leting me speak. He asked me to code few aspects of the system and write implementation of few api's.
Feedback: Lean to hire
Recruiter scheduled one more design interview for me as she felt I was asked a domain specific question. She scheduled the next design round to be generic distributed system design.
Onsite 6- System Design
Interviewer was very friendly. I was asked to build a specific Google product. Overall, a very good and healthy discussion. I led the discussion, discussed HLD, bottlenecks and tradeoffs.
Feedback: Hire
Packet was submitted to HC and I was downleveled to L4. HC suggested 1 more design interview to avoid false positive.
Onsite 7 - System design
I followed the following strategy.
Requirements(functional & non functional), Estimations, Approaches, Pros/Cons, Operation excellence, bottlenecks of systems
Feedback: Hire
Packet was sent to HC again and this time got approved for L5.
Offer details - https://leetcode.com/discuss/compensation/1743408/Google-or-Bengaluru-or-India-or-L5
Other offers - FB - E5, Microsoft - L64, Salesforce - PMTS , InMobi - Staff Engineer, Adobe - Sr CS 1 & Capillary Tech - Staff Engineer
Rejections: Rippling & Atlassian
Luck plays an important role in interviews. Hard work always pays off.
Prepration Strategy
- Doing LC regularly for ~1.8 years.
- Solved 1400 questions. Some would say, quality over quantity, but I didn't wanted to leave anything on luck.
- For Google coding rounds, speed, accuracy, able to solve 2 questions in 40 minutes, thought process and speaking loud is important.
- For Design, I mostly relied on youtube videos on various topics. Google gives lot of emphasis on leading the discussions, multiple approaches, pros & cons, bottlenecks and tradeoffs.
- Youtube channels - Usenix, DevOxx, Hasgeek tv, etc. I used to watch company tech talks on how they solved a specific problem and what tech stack they used. For a year, built a habit of reading 10 medium articles daily to improve my knowledge in general not to crack interviews.
Adobe interview experience - https://leetcode.com/discuss/interview-experience/1740723/Adobe-or-Bengaluru-or-Sr-CS-1-or-Offer
InMobi interview experience - https://leetcode.com/discuss/interview-experience/1742135/Inmobior-Bengaluruor-Staff-Engineer-or-Offer