Hi Everyone,

This forum has helped me a lot during my preparation, so I thought I'd share my experience and hopefully help someone who is preparing.

Timeline:

Day 0: Applied through the portal with referrral.

Day 3: Recruiter reached out and shared the online assessment with a week to complete it.

Day 4: Completed the assessment.

Day 11: Received a call from the recruiter that I had been shortlisted for interviews.

Day 21: Interview loop scheduled. Had 3 rounds on the same day.

Round 1: DSA
Question 1: Design a data structure that supports a continuous stream of numbers with the following operations:

• Add a number to the list
• Query the current Top K most frequent numbers

Operations could come in any order and should work efficiently for an infinite stream.

Similar problem : top-k-numbers on gfg

Question 2: Convert a sorted Doubly Linked List into a height-balanced BST without creating new nodes.

Verdict: Positive

Round 2: DSA (for me this round was supposed to be LLD but it did not happen)
Question 1:Implement Merge Sort from scratch and discuss complexity, recursion tree, and optimizations.

Question 2: Count the number of set bits in an integer using bitwise operations.

• I used repeated right shifts and checked the least significant bit.

Question 3: Similar to this: https://leetcode.com/problems/find-all-anagrams-in-a-string/description/

Verdict: Positive

Round 3: System Design + Hiring Manager

Project Deep Dive: A detailed discussion around projects from my current role, including:

• Architectural decisions
• Production challenges
• Trade-offs
• Customer impact
• Ownership and collaboration

Behavioral questions were mostly around:

• Why looking for a change
• Career goals and mentoring
• Handling disagreements
• Driving initiatives
• Cross-team collaboration

HLD Question- Design a large-scale payment processing platform end-to-end.
Started with a high-level architecture and then moved into detailed discussions around:

• Request flow
• Scalability
• Reliability
• Consistency
• Idempotency
• Failure handling
• Retry mechanisms
• Database choices
• Monitoring and observability

Most follow-up questions came from design trade-offs and non-functional requirements.
Verdict: Positive

Result
Day 28: Recruiter informed me that the overall feedback was positive and they would proceed with the offer process.

Day 38: Received the offer and accepted it.

Final Thoughts
The interviews were not about memorizing solutions. What helped most was:
Strong DSA fundamentals
Explaining the reasoning behind solutions
Discussing trade-offs clearly
Understanding system design fundamentals
Being able to deep dive into projects you've actually worked on

Big thanks to everyone who shares experiences here. Reading such posts genuinely helped me prepare better, so hopefully this helps someone else as well.

Good luck to everyone preparing!

Compensation details: https://leetcode.com/discuss/post/8467595/salesforce-offer-by-anonymous_user-a7z2/