Skills Required
Round 1 – DSA + Coding (90 Minutes)
The first round consisted of two coding problems on an online coding platform. The focus was on writing optimized solutions and explaining the approach.
Questions:
- Given an array of integers, find the longest subarray with sum equal to K.
- Design an LRU Cache supporting O(1) get() and put() operations.
Follow-up Discussion:
- Time and space complexity analysis.
- Edge cases and scalability.
- How would the solution behave for very large datasets?
Topics Covered:
- HashMap
- Sliding Window
- Linked List
- Design Problems
Round 2 – Java, Spring Boot & MongoDB (75 Minutes)
This round focused on backend development and framework knowledge.
Java
- Difference between HashMap and ConcurrentHashMap.
- How does JVM memory management work?
- Explain volatile, synchronized, and ReentrantLock.
- Java 8 Stream API questions.
- Garbage Collection basics.
Spring Boot
- Bean lifecycle.
- Dependency Injection.
- Spring Boot Auto Configuration.
- REST API exception handling.
- Transaction Management.
- Microservices communication.
MongoDB
- Indexes and compound indexes.
- Aggregation Pipeline.
- Embedding vs Referencing.
- Sharding basics.
- Why choose MongoDB over a relational database?
A small coding task was also given to design a REST API for Product Inventory with CRUD operations.
Round 3 – System Design (90 Minutes)
The interviewer asked me to design a Product Recommendation Service similar to Flipkart.
Discussion included:
- High-level architecture.
- API Design.
- Database selection.
- Cache using Redis.
- Handling millions of requests.
- Horizontal scaling.
- Load Balancer.
- Message Queue for asynchronous processing.
- Logging and Monitoring.
- Failure handling.
The interviewer continuously asked follow-up questions about scaling, bottlenecks, and improving latency.
Round 4 – Hiring Manager + CS Fundamentals (60 Minutes)
The discussion started with my previous projects and the technical challenges I had solved.
CS Fundamentals
- Process vs Thread.
- Deadlock conditions.
- Virtual Memory.
- Database Normalization.
- ACID properties.
- CAP Theorem.
- Indexing vs Partitioning.
- SQL vs NoSQL.
- REST vs gRPC.
Behavioral questions included:
- Tell me about a production issue you resolved.
- A time when you disagreed with your team.
- How do you review code?
- How do you mentor junior engineers?
The interviewer also discussed my current responsibilities, architecture decisions, and ownership of production systems.
Result
Selected.
Preparation Tips
- Practice medium-level DSA problems focusing on HashMap, Trees, Graphs, and Dynamic Programming.
- Be comfortable with Java multithreading, collections, and JVM internals.
- Revise Spring Boot concepts such as Dependency Injection, Transactions, Security, and REST API best practices.
- Learn MongoDB indexing, aggregation, and schema design.
- Prepare one end-to-end system design (URL Shortener, Product Catalog, Notification Service, etc.).
- Revise Operating Systems, DBMS, Networking, and OOP concepts.
- Be ready to discuss projects in depth, including architecture decisions and performance optimizations.
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