Agoda interview experience | Staff software engineer

Four major rounds are there (with 1 HR call)

Coding Round -> Platform Round -> Call with HR -> System Design -> Managerial Round

Round 1: DSA round live coding on Hackerrank with interviewer | 60 minutes

The interviewer doesn't really ask anything, apart from basic questions, this just about solving the DSA problems fully.
Two problems in 60 minutes

• First question: Calculate the weight of the molecule, molecule will only contain C, H, O who have weights 12, 1, 8 respectively. There will only be one digit in case of multi atom like CH4. Formula contains only C, H, O and any digits. - can be done with two pointer (stack is not really needed)
• Second question follow-up on first: now the formula can contain brackets, and the number outside bracket means that the molecule inside the bracket weight is now that many times, i.e. H(CH4)2 is 33 - stack is needed now

Round 2: Platform Round on Hackerrank | 60 minutes

Part 1: Improve architecture design

Suppliers pulling booking data from our platform. A very basic design was shown and was asked to improve the architecture. Something like below.

Suppliers --> External API --> Internal booking API --> Database

Suppliers have an API exposed POST /getBookings
The internal booking API is used by checkout to write the bookings into the DB

Suggested multiple improvements and had discussions around

• authentication
• rate limiting
• separation of read and write
• cache
• DB replicas
• DB sharding
• API design to be GET /bookings with pagination

Time bound, about 30-35 minutes

Part 2: Testing

What testing strategies would you adopt for making this system production ready?
The interviewer was mainly keen on knowing if I know the testing pyramid and different testing strategies.

Part 3: Code review

It had mistakes like -
Initializing repositories inside the method, instead of using DI
Cache having no TTL
Many if-elses, could have used strategy pattern for it
Exception handling not correctly done, logging could have been improved

Verdict: Rejected

Feedback was that based on my interview and 6 YOE, they said I was better fit for Senior role.

Even though I was rejected, I had good experience interviewing, they are flexible and provide materials to prepare as well before the round.

Hope this helps others!