Adobe | Member of Technical Staff 2 (Java, Spring Boot)

I applied through a referral and received a call from the recruiter. The interview was conducted in person, with all rounds scheduled on the same day.

Round 1 (≈1.5 hours)

The interviewer spent most of the time discussing my resume in depth rather than asking coding questions.

Instead of asking DSA, he went through almost every bullet point on my resume and expected me to justify and explain each one in detail. For every project and work experience, he kept asking how I would scale it further, the design decisions involved, and the trade‑offs.

• Detailed discussion of my professional experience.
• Deep dive into my internship project, even though it was completed three years ago.
• Personal projects and the architecture behind them.
• High‑Level Design (HLD) of one of my projects.
• Modern backend technologies such as Kafka, RabbitMQ, Redis, and where they fit in a distributed system.

One challenge given towards the end of the interview was:

Problem:

• Sort 1 billion numbers that cannot fit into main memory.

The discussion revolved around designing an external sorting approach under memory constraints. I was able to arrive at the expected solution.

However, by that point, I felt the interviewer had already formed an opinion about my profile. My resume was heavily focused on C++, whereas the role was specifically looking for candidates with strong Java and Spring Boot experience. Most of the interview was spent validating whether my experience translated well to the Java ecosystem.

Result: Rejected after Round 1.

Takeaway: If a role emphasizes a particular technology stack, be prepared for the interviewer to validate every relevant claim on your resume. Also, expect deep discussions on system design and the technologies you mention, even if no coding questions are asked.