The offered compensation was 26 LPA and a stipend of 1LPM for 6 months.The interview was on campus at a tier 2 university.

The first round was primarily focused on my projects and internship experience. The interviewer spent a significant amount of time discussing the implementation details of my backend projects, message queues, and the work I had done during my internships. The discussion then moved to designing an e-commerce listing service, followed by core computer science concepts such as the OSI model, database indexing, deadlock conditions, the complete lifecycle of a request from DNS resolution to browser and router caches, CDNs, memory leaks, and the difference between throughput and I/O operations. The round concluded with LeetCode 643 (Maximum Average Subarray I).

The second round began with LeetCode 904 (Fruit Into Baskets) and then shifted towards infrastructure and cloud concepts. The interviewer asked questions on private subnets, Kubernetes Persistent Volumes (PV) and Persistent Volume Claims (PVC), IAM, RBAC, Amazon EBS, Docker, Kubernetes, AWS, and vectorization. The discussion was much deeper into SRE fundamentals compared to the first round.

Verdict

Rejected – The interviewers felt that I was not the right fit for an SRE role.