Adobe CS 1 | Interview Exp

Adobe CS1 Interview Experience (5.8 YOE Backend Engineer)

Background:

• 5.8 YOE backend engineer at a large investment bank
• 45 LPA CTC

This was my first interview after college. Recruiter reached out via Instahyre

R1 - DSA

Question:

• Longest Substring with At Most K Distinct Characters https://leetcode.com/problems/longest-substring-with-at-most-k-distinct-characters/

Interviewer joined late and directly jumped to the question. Standard sliding window problem, had solved it before so was able to code/explain it comfortably.

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R2 - DSA + Project Discussion

Started with questions around my current project/work.

Coding question:

• Merge Intervals https://leetcode.com/problems/merge-intervals/description/

Solved successfully. Both DSA rounds happened on Hackerrank on the same day.

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R3 - Project Deep Dive + HLD (F2F Noida)

This round was heavily focused on past work:

• design decisions
• tradeoffs
• failure handling
• scaling
• concurrency scenarios

Then interviewer asked to design a URL Shortener.

Discussion included:

• unique short URL generation
• DB schema design
• what fields to store and why
• Redis caching
• cache eviction strategy
• scaling bottlenecks

One thing I noticed: interviewer cared much more about reasoning behind decisions than “perfect architecture”.

Overall this round went well and felt like a genuine engineering discussion.

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R4 - Hiring Manager + HLD

Again started with deep discussion around my current project and architecture decisions.

Then came:

• “Design YouTube”

This was the toughest round for me. Since I had just started HLD prep, I honestly froze for a few seconds.

I started with basic architecture:

• videos in S3/object storage
• pre‑signed upload/download URLs
• metadata in Postgres/DynamoDB

But interviewer quickly moved to harder parts:

• encoding/transcoding
• adaptive bitrate streaming
• CDN usage
• buffering optimization
• video compression
• handling huge video traffic efficiently

We discussed this for ~30 mins, but I lacked depth in my solution (he was from multimedia domain so he went really deep into stuff). Round didn’t go well.

Biggest learning: For senior backend interviews, interviewers focus a lot on the “hard parts” of distributed systems.

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R5 - AI-driven LLD Round

This was a new AI‑assisted round on Hackerrank.

Question:

• Design a Feature Flag Service

Requirements included:

• user/context‑based rollouts
• app‑version targeting
• conditional enable/disable logic, etc.

This round went badly for me.

I approached it like a normal LLD round by discussing entities/classes first. But the interviewer was evaluating:

• how effectively you use AI
• how quickly you iterate
• validating AI‑generated output
• completeness of solution

I should have leveraged AI much earlier instead of trying to manually structure everything upfront.

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Final Takeaways

• Know your current project extremely well — most discussions revolved around that
• For HLD, prepare beyond standard diagrams and focus on scaling bottlenecks/tradeoffs
• Interviewers challenge every design decision with “why?”
• AI‑assisted interviews are becoming real, and require separate preparation
• Practicing only DSA is definitely not enough for senior backend roles

Overall a really good learning experience with a strong focus on practical engineering depth.