Interview Process

Round 1: Initial Discussion (30 min)

• Focus: Introduction and behavioral.
• Details: Deep dive into my past experience, my current role, and the impact of my recent projects.

Round 2: Low-Level Design (LLD) (60 min)

• Topic: Design a Rate Limiter.
• Details: Required implementing different rate-limiting strategies:
  • Sliding Window protocol.
  • Allowing an exact X number of requests.
  • Rate limit window configuration (Eg - X request allowed till initial 30 mili sec...)
  • User-based rate limiting.

Round 3: High-Level Design (HLD) (60 min)

• Topic: Design a Notification Microservice.
• Details: End-to-end architecture discussion on how to scale, handle failures, and manage different notification channels (Email, SMS, Push, etc.).

Round 4: Low-Level Design (LLD) (60 min)

• Topic: Design BookMyShow (BMS).
• Details: Core focus on database schema and data modeling. We went deep into:
  • Tables, indexes, and relations.
  • Mapping between tables (e.g., resolving concurrency issues during seat booking).
  • Follow-up questions based on my resume.

Round 5: High-Level Design (HLD) (60 min)

• Topic: Design an Image Processing Microservice.
• Details: Discussed the architecture for uploading, processing (resizing, compressing, watermarking), and serving images at scale.

Key Takeaways & Observations

• Cloud Focus: Across all rounds, the interviewers were highly focused on AWS and its specific ecosystem of services. If you are interviewing here, brush up heavily on AWS architecture patterns.