I had applied to 50+ roles on the careers page and eventually received a HackerRank test link for one of them. After completing the test, I heared back after 1.5 months, I got a call from the interview scheduler to set up the rounds.

There were three rounds in total, scheduled over a span of 5 days.

Round 1 (DSA Problem Solving Coding):
This round was heavily focused on coding.

The main problem revolved around designing a dictionary-like system where words from different languages were stored and queried. The challenge was to support operations like:

inserting words
updating/removing words
counting frequency of a word
handling prefix-based queries

I initially discussed multiple approaches (like hashmap-based solutions), but eventually moved to a Trie-based approach and had to implement it from scratch. The interviewer asked me to write different functions around it and also discuss edge cases.

A big part of the discussion was around handling tricky cases like:

words with common prefixes
variations in word endings
multiple occurrences across different categories

At the end, I was also asked what kind of test cases I would write to validate the solution.

Round 2 (DSA + Behavioral):
This round started with a deep dive into my past work.

One of my projects was discussed in detail — the interviewer kept asking “why” at every step (why a certain technology was used, why a design decision was made, why a specific component like caching was needed, etc.). It was more about understanding my thought process than just the outcome.

There were also some general questions like:

Where I see myself in 3-5 years down the line?
How seniors/teammates would describe me?
How would you describe engineering & social culture at your previous team?
What would you like to improve in yourself based on feedback you received?
What innovative ideas have you implemented in the team?

Towards the end, there was a short DSA question:

Given a string with different types of brackets, check if it is balanced
If not, determine the minimum number of reversals needed to make it balanced

This involved discussing both stack-based and optimized approaches.

Round 3 (DSA + Culture/Team Fit):
This round was a mix of coding and discussion.

Two medium-level DSA problems were asked. The focus wasn’t just on solving them, but also on how the solution would change if constraints or input conditions were modified.

There were also some general discussions around:

why I’m looking for a change
what kind of work I’m interested in
expectations from the team

I also asked a few questions about the team and projects towards the end.

Overall, the process had a strong focus on fundamentals, clarity of thought, and being able to explain decisions in depth, especially around past work.

Got the final result after 10-12 days.
Verdict: Hire