Current Exp: 4.6 years - Fintech

Applied directly on portal and received the call.

There was no OA taken.

R1: this was a DSA round.
que was something like this: we have one big string and dictionary of words. we need to find all the substrings in big string which are any permutation of dictionary words. and return its starting index. dictionary can have duplicates and each duplicate should be present in substring.

first i gave Trie approach, then shifted to HashMap approach.
50 minutes were already gone in this. but interviwer asked me to optimize as i was not reusing the computation. then i got the 2-pointer approach and presented it. interviwer seemed convinced and asked me to stretch 30 more minutes to write the code.

R2: mix round: DSA + HLD. Interviewer seemed pissed off from start (always one guy is like that).

DSA que was biological hazzards. i was able to implement using two adj list of TreeSets. but the guy was so intimidating, i could not see that i had used min function instead of max. and test cases failed.
then he moved to HLD que. very vague que.
there is black box source. from which we will get some GB file and we need to make processing system which takes this file and fetch few other datasets from other sources and need to do some computation and ingest processed data into DB at steady rate of 10k per minute.

I have worked on such systems. it was not new for me. but i needed info on source. i constantly asked for source clarification.
what is source? a DB, a unixbox, can they provide rest API? no good response. just one line "Its Black box".

still i suggested few approaches like if its unix, we can use sftp to get file, REST can't get that level of data. so in that case we can provide S3 bucket url so source can first place file there and then we can use something like Spark to process file. he mentioned: no market tools like "Spark".
i don't know what was with the guy but he must have given me low score.

Still i got call for R3. i thought i am saved.

R3: 30 Minutes round. Interviewer was friendly and asked LLD of warehouse system.
in LLD of inventory system, there is not much scope to impress so i added concurrency and notification feature. wrapped in 30 minutes.

I got confirmation for last AA round and it was scheduled 2 days after call. but in morning got mail that last round is cancelled and feedback will be provided to me later.

A little demotivating but hey it's life.