hi readers,

Background: BCA (1.7 YOE)

Timeline
NOVEMBER

A recruiter reached out regarding an L3 Software Engineer opportunity.
November

Round 1 (Virtual Coding)- 2 questions: Backtracking(easy-medium) and Prefix Sum(medium-hard),
Round 2 (Virtual Googliness)- Standard Behavioral
Fortunately, I cleared both rounds and was invited for onsite interviews.

January
I traveled to Bangalore for two in-person coding interviews.

Round 3 (Coding)- Graph(easy-medium) and Monotonic stack + Line sweep(medium-hard)
Round 4 (Coding)- 2D DP(Hard)
Team Matching + Hiring Committee
Got feedback of onsite after a week and my packet was sent for TM. TM was scheduled within a week and after a successful TM round my packet was then sent to Hiring Committee review.

Offer
Following HC approval, I had a compensation discussion and finally received and accepted the offer in Feb.

Overall Thoughts
The process was long and required a lot of patience.
There were multiple periods of silence and some rescheduling along the way, so it's important not to overanalyze timelines or compare them with others.
Communication, clean coding, and discussing trade-offs clearly were just as important as arriving at the optimal solution.
Team matching and Hiring Committee can take time, and every candidate's timeline is different.
Grateful for everyone who shared their experiences here, it helped me tremendously throughout the process.

P.S.- Please don't ask for exact questions. I couldn't find any of my exact interview questions, and most of them were wrapped in a story/context. If you've built a strong understanding of the underlying topics and patterns, you'll be well prepared to tackle them. All the best!