Recently went through the interview process for a Senior Software Engineer role. Sharing my experience in case it helps others preparing.
TL;DR: 4 rounds – System Design / LLD (60 min), DSA (60 min), Hiring Manager (90 min), Director (30 min). Strong emphasis on communication, design clarity, and fundamentals.
Process consisted of 4 rounds:
Round 1 – System Design / LLD (60 mins)
Focus was on API design and backend best practices. Topics discussed:
• Designing REST APIs
• Choosing appropriate HTTP status codes
• Structuring request/response models
• Error handling strategies
• Design principles like modularity, separation of concerns, and maintainability
• Writing clean and extensible APIs
Round 2 – DSA (60 mins) – 3 Problems
Problem 1 – Graph BFS
Similar to the Minimum Genetic Mutation problem where you mutate one character at a time to reach a target sequence. Typical BFS shortest path approach.
Problem 2 – Streaming / Heap
Given a stream of names, find the Top K most frequent names. Concepts involved frequency counting and maintaining a heap.
Problem 3 – Graph DFS
Dependencies were given as edges and some nodes were failing. The goal was to determine which nodes would not fail, requiring DFS traversal and failure propagation logic.
Round 3 – Hiring Manager Round (90 mins)
This round focused heavily on communication and problem understanding.
Started with some scenario-based questions.
Then a DSA problem similar to Merge Intervals. The key focus was first explaining the requirement clearly before jumping into coding. After solving the base problem, additional complexity was introduced and we discussed how the solution could be extended.
Round 4 – Director Round (30 mins)
High-level discussion including:
• Resume walkthrough
• Past projects and engineering decisions
• Ownership and collaboration
• Cultural fit
