I asked for referral in Lowes for Software Engineer role, through one of my linkedin connections, and then was reached out by HR.

About me:

YOE : 3
Techstack: Java, springboot, J2ee, kafka, redis, rest/soap, Monolithic/microservices architecture.

Interview Process:

1. Technical Round 1 :

   • Interviewer: Senior SE with 7 years experience

   • Asked about my project work from previous company, since i had microservices exposure there. We discussed extended scenarios on that also.

   • Draw HLD for microservices architecture i designed in my previous company; discussed about various aspects on that related to latency, performance etc.

   • Gave 1 leetcode medium DSA question - which i solved with brute force and better approach.

   • We discussed more on kafka internal functioning, since the role also involve working with kafka extensively.

   • Gave 1 easy DSA question - I discussed brute and optimal and solved with optimal approach.

   • End of discussion : I asked few questions related to company, and general feedback for round.

     Verdict: Passed ✅ (Got feedback after 2-3 days)

2. Technical Round 2 :

   • Interviewer: Lead SE with 10 years experience

   • Asked for LLD of my current company's product (monolithic architecture based), and we discussed about potential challenges to that, and how would i resolve them.

   • Discussed the difference microservices and monolith, how to identify when to use which one. Steps to break monolithic application, to microservices when its already live in production.

   • Gave 1 leetcode medium DSA question - which i solved with brute force - recursion/backtracking. Discussed about time complexity.

   • Scenario based questions on microservice communication, how to identify that a ms is down/crashing. Some resume based discussion on my work related to Authorization/RBAC.

   • End of discussion : I asked few questions related to company, and general feedback for round.

     Verdict: Passed ✅ (Got feedback after 1 week)

3. Hiring Manager Round

   • Interviewer: Engineering Manager with 15 years experience.

   • Asked about my current role, experience.

   • We discussed on webhooks and SSE, as i have worked on that in previous organization, and used reactive programming. Since the role required Reactive Programming knowledge too.

   • What is Mono and Flux difference.

   • Kafka : what is log compaction

   • How will i handle kafka failures if not able to send/consume messages efficiently? - Discussed retry strategies/DLQ.

   • How to proceed for improving API TAT. Gave one realtime example from my work experience.

   • Do i also have exposure to React/UI? - I am not having that so told honestly.

   • Will i be comfortable working with Kotlin? - I told yes, though i dont have any experience working on that, but i am willing to adapt that.

   • Asked about current company, what domain it is in, and some general discussion around that.

   • Why am i looking for switch within 1 year of joining the company? - i told honestly, that tech stack is old here and i want to work on latest technologies, as i did in my previous company.

   • End of Discussion: I asked questions about team, work they do and expectations from me in first quarter.

     Verdict: Passed ✅ (Got feedback next day)

4. HR discussion and salary negotiations are pending.

I wrote about my interview experience in depth, because lately i am not able to find any post where people have talked about their experiences in depth.

Hopefully it will be of help to someone.