I recently got the opportunity to interview at Astrotalk.
YOE: 0 (1 year in internships)
2026 Graduate, IIT
Round 1 (Virtual)
Started the discussion around my resume with a few follow-ups on whatever work I had done.
After that, the discussion moved to Java/Spring Boot fundamentals, as I have mostly worked with them. Things like:
- Autowired
- AOP
- Dependency Injection
- Circular Dependency
Then the discussion moved to real-world scenarios like:
- Designing an API to handle duplicate button clicks
- Rate limiting notifications
DSA
-
Edit Distance
Only brute force was required. -
Lowest Common Ancestor of a Binary Tree
In the end, there were some puzzles from Brainstellar.
Verdict: Cleared R1 comfortably
Round 2 (Virtual)
The interview was mostly around backend, system design, databases, Kafka, caching and some experience-based questions.
It started with resume discussion. I had worked around SQS and Kafka previously, so there were many follow-ups regarding both SQS and Kafka, like:
- Why did you choose Kafka?
- How would you make a Kafka consumer idempotent?
- Kafka partitions, keys and the relationship between partitions and consumers
- How would you optimize a slow API?
- Database query optimization and indexes
- Composite index for
WHERE country = ? AND state = ? ORDER BY creation_time DESC - How would you parallelize independent operations in an API?
- Design an astrologer-listing service with Redis caching
- Cache stampede and how to handle it
- What happens if Redis goes down? How would you design a fallback?
- Circuit breaker and its use
- Choosing RDBMS vs NoSQL for a chat service
- SQS vs Kafka: when would you choose one over the other?
- Biggest/difficult problem you worked on
Ended with a few questions around team structure, day-to-day work, ownership and engineering challenges.
Verdict: Cleared R2 comfortably
Round 3 (Noida Office)
This round started similarly to the previous round. The first half an hour was mostly around my work and follow-ups on that.
After that, we had discussions based on real-world scenarios.
One of the main questions was to design a system for Astrologer Suggestions in the app. Basically, which astrologers should be visible to a user.
The design had to consider scenarios like:
- Paid astrologers
- Free astrologers
- Region-specific astrologers
- Language preferences
- Other relevant factors
There were some follow-ups on the design and one more specific scenario that I don't remember exactly.
Round 4 (Same Day, CTO)
This round was short, around 20-25 minutes.
Started with discussion around my previous work and then moved to some DSA and CS fundamentals.
Questions/topics included:
- Merge Sort
- Intuitive meaning of
log(n) - Explaining why the complexity of Merge Sort is
O(n log(n)) - Cache
- LRU Cache algorithm
- Basic OS concepts
Verdict: Selected
Final Outcome
I rejected the offer as I received another offer with better compensation.
Astrotalk Offer:
16 LPA Base + 2 LPA Retention Bonus
Overall, the interviews were quite good and focused heavily on practical backend knowledge, system design and understanding of things I had actually worked on.
For someone with 0 YOE but good internship experience, I found the interviews pretty fair. Most of the questions were around fundamentals and being able to explain the reasoning behind your decisions rather than just knowing definitions.