I recently interviewed for the SDE-2 position at Dream11, and the process was thorough, with six rounds in total. The first two rounds were conducted virtually, and upon clearing them, I was invited to Dream11’s Mumbai office for the remaining three rounds. The last round happened virtually as well. Dream11 took care of all travel arrangements, including flight tickets and cab transportation, making the experience smooth and well-organized. Here’s a breakdown of each round and my experience:
Round 1: Data Structures and Algorithms (DSA) - VIRTUAL
Overview : This round focused on DSA concepts, where I was asked to solve 3 problems within a limited time (1h).
Problems :
*Problem 1: Was a Binary Search question
*Problem 2: Car Fleet
*Problem 3: Linked List question
Difficulty : Easy
Round 2: Database - VIRTUAL
Overview : The recruiter mentioned that this round would focus on database concepts and a deep dive into my resume. The interviewer would explore my past experiences, delve into my design choices, and thoroughly examine the tech stack I used in previous projects.
Problems : Interviewers asked to describe the project I am currently working on and the p[rojects i had worked in the past], they wanted to understand the design choices you made, asked question around why a particular tech stack / database was chosen. There were question around concurrency control , isolation levels , locks , replication.
So in short the discussion started from the project discussion and then went into design choices which was then followed by the db choice, concurrency control, isolation level in database. Scenario based questions,
This round went on for 1hr.
Difficulty : Medium
Experience : I have never experienced such a interview round taken by any company, Interviewers kept me on the edges and I got a feeling if I messed up any of the questions, they had the technical expertise to grill me hard on the topic.
Round 3: HLD - F2F
Overview : This was a high-level design round aimed at assessing my system design skills. The interviewer, a senior engineer with over five years of experience at Dream11, guided the discussion.
Problems : I was told to design a alerting and monitoring system like prometheus and grafana. The expectation was to first define scope of the system NFR's and FR's, estimate scale and database storage layer, Consistency vs Availability discussion. How will timeseries data be stored and in what format. When a new pod comes up how will prometheus server know that we have to start scraping metrics from this pod. There were dicussions around how will you maintain active web connection with so many clients at the same time to scrape metrics.
This round went on for 1hr 15 mins.
Difficulty : Hard
Experience : This was a very difficult round , discussions were mostly open ended and they were just judging you on your ability to think about solution and pros and cons of each approach , challenging questions were asked to judge your technical skills. Interviewers were also helpful if you get struck on the problem statement.
(Note - Capacity estimations was a surprise for me as rarely anyone actually asks it, i was asked to tell the no of events coming in, the storage each event would take in the time series db and other questions as well)
(Note - In deapth discussion related to database sharding and table partitioning was also done)
This round went on for 2hr 15 mins.
Round 4: Hiring Manager - F2F
Overview : This round was taken by a hiring manager as the VP was not available .
Problems : Question was asked around your previous work experience, certain scenario based questios like
Scenario based questions, SDLC , sharding related questions, reason for change, conflict resolution, challenges and thing related to it were discussed in detail
Difficulty : Easy
This round went on for 1hr.
Round 5: HR - F2F
Overview : This was taken by a very experience HR.
Problems : The HR round included common questions, with a focus on getting to know my background more personally. She asked about my childhood, schooling, college experiences, and how I developed an interest in coding. We also discussed my reasons for wanting to leave my current company and my perspective on the people I currently work with. Additionally, she presented a few scenario-based questions to understand my approach in various situations like
Tell me a situation where you went above and beyond to complete a task.
If I call your manager today what are your strengths and weeknesses he would tell me.
Tell me a situation where you failed but It proved out to be a blessing in disguise.
Difficulty : Easy
This round went on for 1hr.
Round 6: Hiring Manager - VIRTUAL
Overview : This round was taken by the VP this time(Another HM round in my case only, doesn't happen usually).
Problems : Question was asked around your previous work experience, certain scenario based questions, SDLC , sharding related questions, reason for change, conflict resolution, challenges and thing related to it were discussed in detail
Difficulty : Medium
This round went on for 1hr.
Three days after the interview, I received an email requesting documentation.
Comp Details : https://leetcode.com/discuss/post/6581941/dream11-sde-2-by-lespank-adp8/
