I am currently an L63 at microsoft with 6.5 yoe in total, worked at Amazon previously.

Following is the rough timeline of the whole process:

1. I applied to salesforce directly through their careers site, and a recruiter reached out to me on linkedIn aswell.
2. Within two days of my connect with the recruiter, they sent an OA.
3. After I cleared the OA, I was slated for the upcoming hiring drive, which was the very same week (usually they take place on friday).
4. I was informed of the decision by the following Monday.

Details about the rounds:

1. Online Assesment : There were two questions

•   Given two strings s1 and s2, find the length of the longest string s3, such that s3 is a subsequence of s1 and substring of s2.

•   Don't exactly remember the question, needed a combination of hash map and priority queue to solve the problem.

Online Interview: Each round was an elimination round.

1. Coding :

• Given a list of directed edges[ui, vi] and a list of queries[ai, bi] , return a list of integers, where each element is the number of hops to reach from ai to bi
• Given two strings s1 and s2, which contain alphabets and # (where # indicates a backspace), return true if s1 = s2 after applying all backspaces, false otherwise.

Solved both the problems , so I knew I should be through to next round

2. LLD :

• Design a parking lot
  Approach:
  Came up with the low-level class structure , which included factory, strategy and singleton patterns as applicable.
  Discussed database schema of the entities we would store.

  Interviewer had questions on handling concurrency, gave him the solution for :

  1. Concurrency control when there are multiple threads.
  2. Concurrency control if our application is made distributed and we are using a central database.

  At each step I was explaining the available options and reasoned why I am going ahead with a specific choice, answered any questions he had periodically , by taking a pause. At the end of it he had no open questions. So I felt positive about this round.

3. Manager round: The Manager was a delight to talk to, it was mostly conversational and it was one of the best managerial rounds I got to be a part of.

• First, he asked me given you worked at two big corporations, Amazon and Microsoft, what is the major difference in the two that you have learnt. (I quoted the agility and customer obsession at Amazon vs the caution and Robustness at Micrososft).
  Instead of directly asking questions from my previous experience(which I was mostly prepared for), the interviwer asked me what is the problem I liked from my previous rounds. I said the parking lot one, as it made me think of a lot of constraints.
• He started off from here, put various constraints on the app and asked me questions along the following lines:
  • Given what you have earlier queoted (customer obsession vs Robustness), how should we modify our application along these two lines, what tradeoffs do we make, and why.
  • What would be important for you, your customer, or the customers customer.
  • Different failure handling and detection Mechanisms.
  • An instance in my career where I knew nothing about a system but had to debug a high sev incident, what were the steps taken.
  • There was a shadow interviewer, he made me simulate two cases with her :
    • There is an upcoming launch and we discover something is broken, the other team owns it. Walk me through the process of error discovery, identifying the right owner and fixing the issue before the big launch tomorrow.
    • If we have to co-develop an app with help from partner team, what are the things you'd do to ensure faster delivery (he was looking for answer from a tech perspective and not process perspective).

These were few questions from a very dense discussion we had covering multiple topics.
At the end of the interview, he gave me a positive signal and told it was a very nice interaction. At this point, I thought I might've made it.