LeetCode has given me a lot, and it's my time to contribute something back to it. Here’s my interview journey for a Systems & Infrastructure Engineering (SSE) role, with 5.5 years of experience. Although I was ultimately rejected, the experience was incredibly valuable, and I’d love to share what I learned throughout the process
Initial Screening:
The process began with a call from the recruiter, discussing my projects, experience, and compensation expectations. After this, I was scheduled for a phone interview.
Phone Interview:
The phone screen included discussions about:
All projects discussion like major challenges faced, toughest project till now, questions on LB and K8s, etc..
Operating system concepts (paging, thrashing, segmentation, page faults, Mutex Vs Semaphore, etc..)
Core Java concepts (final, finalize, finally, Garbage Collection, etc..)
OOP principles
Then, I was asked to solve a LeetCode problem: All Oone Data Structure
Follow-up: How would you handle duplicate elements in the structure? Link
I managed to solve both problems and clear the phone screen.
Onsite Round 1 (R1): DSA
The first onsite round was focused on DSA with two problems:
Q1) Find K Closest Elements
Q2) Find the Celebrity
Both were solvable with a bit of thought.
Onsite Round 2 (R2): Hiring Manager:
In this round, We discussed about my past projects, especially the hardest problems I solved in distributed systems.
I was given a system design question:
"We have catalog events coming at Google scale. We need to enhance the catalog by adding extra fields and use this data for analytics. Design a system for this."
Lots of cross questions like why kafka, DB choices, failures, etc..
The discussion around the system design was engaging and challenging.
Onsite Round 3 (R3): System Design HLD:
This round was a High-Level Design question: "Design a distributed job scheduler. You are given an API to fetch machines for running jobs. Design a system that schedules jobs, executes them, and triggers alerts."
Unfortunately, the interviewer didn’t seem familiar with distributed system concepts, I think this round contributed to my rejection.
Onsite Round 4 (R4): DSA:
The final round focused on DSA:
Q1) Max Consecutive Ones III
Q2) A graph problem to find the shortest path between a node and a target node, printing the path.
The hustle never stops. I’ll keep grinding, keep evolving, and keep leveling up until I get where I’m meant to be. Onward and upward! Cheers!
