Adobe interview experience | Noida | 7 yrs exp | Sr. Software Engineer | Offer accepted |

My Adobe Interview Experience

I recently went through the interview process at Adobe for a Senior Software Engineer role. The process consisted of several rounds, which I found to be quite comprehensive and technically challenging. I've slightly modified the questions due to NDA.

1. Coding Round

This round involved two coding problems:

1. The first problem was based on Reverse Nodes in k-Group, but with an interesting twist. The interviewer asked me to reverse nodes in alternating sets of size x and y. For example, I needed to reverse x nodes, then reverse y nodes, and so on.
2. The second problem involved building an auto-complete system based on frequency. Given product names and their frequencies, I had to return the top 3 product names that matched a given prefix, sorted by frequency. The interviewer suggested a similar problem to consider was Longest Common Suffix Queries, but the core problem was distinct.

2. Concurrency Round

Adobe has a dedicated round focused on multi-threading, which I found quite in-depth. I was tasked with creating a task scheduler that supports two main functionalities:

• Single execution: Tasks should be executed once at a given start time, or as soon as a thread becomes available.
• Periodic execution: Tasks needed to be executed repeatedly after a given delay, for a specified number of iterations.

Initially, I proposed a min-heap solution where worker threads would continuously poll for tasks. However, the interviewer specifically guided me to implement a solution using Java's wait(), notify(), and notifyAll() methods. We also had a detailed discussion about the usage and implications of volatile and synchronized keywords in Java.

3. System Design Round

The system design problem involved designing a comprehensive webinar platform. The platform needed to cater to three types of licenses: Silver, Gold, and Platinum. Each license tier would determine:

• The maximum number of participants allowed per individual webinar.
• The overall participant limit for all ongoing webinars a user could host simultaneously.

For instance, a Gold license would permit 100 participants per webinar and a total of 300 participants across all of a user's active webinars. Additionally, the platform had a global constraint of 60,000 active users that needed to be accounted for in the design.

4. Hiring Manager Round

This round was more technical than I had anticipated. The hiring manager presented a real-world problem their team was facing: scaling a legacy monolithic system. The system was originally built for a maximum of 100,000 users, but now they needed to scale it to 1 million users. The critical constraint was that the existing monolith couldn't be modified. I proposed an approach where we could deploy 10 instances of the monolith, with each handling 100,000 users. An intermediate microservice would be responsible for directing users to the correct instance using consistent hashing based on the user's email. To ensure uniqueness, the user ID from the monolith would be combined with the instance number.