YoE: 4Y 3M
Last working day: Sep 2025
Org: A startup in biomedical research
Tech Stack: Python, bash, Cloud(GCP, Azure) based distributed system with event driven architecture
Interviewed for Software Engineer 3 (core team) at Cohesity, Bangalore in May 2026.
Round 1 - Coding
Scheduled with SE-3 from Bangalore
https://leetcode.com/problems/most-stones-removed-with-same-row-or-column/description/
Discussed DFS based and disjoint-set based component count and TC.
The feedback was postive for this round.
Round 2 - Design
Scheduled with SE 3 from Bangalore
LLD - (Can't recall exact constraints/requirements, still added)
An implementation where ordered sequence of values arrive and 10 most recent values are to be displayed when a read is performed. Support low latency writes.
Discussed how it would work in a distributed system. I suggested a queue based approach for writes where we could use idempotency and acid DB to avoid duplicates if queue/ack fails.
The feedback was postive for this round.
Round 3 - Design
Scheduled with a Senior Staff from a US team
Was supposed to be a mix of LLD + HLD. But discussed around my current project of event-driven architecture with high level diagram. The discussion progressively moved towards the backup and recovery work of cohesity.
We discussed about -
- uploading large files using synchronous, async and chunked approaches
- data corruption while upload
- storing chunked data and reusability across tenants(if any)
- replication and erasure coding to handle data loss
- identifying data corruption and recovering it
- downloaading and more
Was a really great discussion with a hands-on professional.
The feedback was postive for this round.
Round 4 - HM
Scheduled with DoE from US.
General Behavioural questions around how my manager, team, family and friends percieve me.
One small technical question about appending one file's content to another. Both files are 100 GB in size. Discussion on what could go wrong.
Told him about reading certain no of characters (depending on RAM size) and appending to the other file. Discussed memory corruption, no disk space and few other points.
As per the recruiter, the technical signal was mixed from this round. So, they scheduled another Coding round.
Additonal Round - Coding
Scheduled with a Senior Staff from a US team
Another hands-on professional from backup and recovery team. Didn't ask any leetcode style question. Instead he asked me to review a simplified codebase around a streaming architecture. It was in CPP. I don't have CPP exposure apart from college. He helped me understand any unknown syntax.
Told him issues around SOLID principles, retry logic without backoff, API documentation for abstract methods and more.
The feedback was postive for this round.
The recruiter told me that things are expected to move slow on the finance side but they were prioritizing my onboarding. Sought updates from my recruiter every day or other. After a week, the recruiter told me to move ahead with other opportunities stating the things are frozen as of now.