Hi, not everyone has success stories, well mine falls into that domain. I was recently interviewed at Salesforce for an MTS role. My current years of experience is 2.5 years. I was refered by a Salesforce employee and my interviews were scheduled soon after that.

One day before first interview. The HR called me and said I had been refered by an associate and explained me about the hiring process. Asked me about my current roles and responsibilities in my current team. How much work experience I had and also asked me about my current CTC.

Interview 1:

The interviewer was a Senior Software Engineer and we started with a general introduction. Honestly I was very very nervous, he said that we would be solving 2 DSA problems and gave me a HackerRank code editior link.

Question 1 : Maximal Square https://leetcode.com/problems/maximal-square/description/

Classic DP problem. I fumbled a bit in the beginning but was able to solve this question and also executed all testcases provided.

Question 2 : Maximal Rectangle https://leetcode.com/problems/maximal-rectangle/description/

This problem can be solved by using Monotonic Stack and by using the underlying principles of Largest Histogram problem.

I knew the solution, but in interview pressure I blanked out. Suddenly I remembered the logic and then gave him a clean dry run of the approach. We then moved to the coding part. Although I was coding this question but he stopped me in between and said time is up and said that he understood what was my intuition was and that its fine.

Honestly I thought I was done. I will definitely be rejected. But verdict came out to be positive.

Verdict : Hire

Interview 2:

The interviewer was a Lead Software Engineer and we started with a general introduction.

Question 1: Knight traversal in a Chessboard. (Medium)
Given a starting position and an ending position give the minimum time to reach the end.

Solution : BFS traversal in Graph

Question 2: Given a stream of numbers and a buffer size of n, the position of each number will be atmost n index off the correct position. My job was to serialize the numbers.(UDP packets ordering)

Solution : Priority Queue(although one approach can be sort the entire array, but storing all numbers was not allowed)

The interviewer particularly liked my Notification System which is one of my project in my current team, from my resume and asked me about the HLD for it. Explained him comfortably.

Verdict : Strong Hire

Interview 3:

This interview was taken by a Senior Manager. Although I was informed by HR that this round will mostly be less of a technical round and more of a behaviorial round.

Questions were:

1. Why did your team decide to decompose the Monolith to Microservices?
2. Why did you avoided synchronous calls instead went with an asynhronous event driven model?
3. Why did you primarily use Kafka and not RabbitMQ or Redis?
4. How did you design your Notification System?
5. Explain what will happen if there happens to be a poison message in the stream and how would you debug and fix this issue.
6. Explain the event driven architecture of your project? How did other teams benefit from this model? Where would you add a circuit breaker pattern if applicable?
7. Considering your consumers how will you prevent race consitions(First of all how is race condition happening here in consumers)?
8. Explain how will you implement DLQ pattern for Kafka as high level.
9. Explain how is the on-call culture in your team and what do you do when u receive a pager.

And few more related to outbox pattern, sidecar pattern. Although I was answering his questions to the best of my knowledge. To which I actually prepared for and I think I did pretty well, but somewhere I felt he was not getting satisfied with my answers and maintained a stone face the entire interview. (If you need the answers comment in the comments section I will give you the exact answers)

Verdict : No Hire

Its fine, sometimes we can work to better ourselves and result is not in our hands.