Senior Software Engineer Interview Experience

Current Role: Lead Software Engineer at EPAM

Round: Online Coding Interview (First Round)

I had two questions:

• 1. DSA: Based on binary search pattern to find maximum of minimum. (I do not remember the question exactly)
• 2. API: I needed to call an external endpoint and parse the response from the JSON (Easy)

Virtual Onsite:

Round 1: DSA (1 hour)

I was asked 1 medium and 1 easy level question.

• 1. Medium - Based on monotonic stack: Somewhat similar to next greater element.
• 2. Easy - Given 2 strings S1 & S2, S1 with some backspace character (#), determine if S1 & S2 are equal after processing # (I needed to delete the previous character in S1 if # is seen).

Self Verdict: Strong Hire

Round 2: Platform Interview (1 hour)

I was asked about my recent projects and its underlying architecture. Some in-depth questions on the tech stack used (KAFKA & DB related stuff).

I was asked if there was something I would like to improve in the design I gave.

Then in the next 30 minutes, I was asked to design a system where I am required to find the inventory of the hotels. I would be querying Agoda's internal data as well as calling external services like Makemytrip, Booking.com to get the inventory data.

This round went well, I was able to come up with a scalable and fault-tolerant design.

Self Verdict: Strong Hire

Round 3: Culture Fit (1 hour)

I was asked usual behavioral interview questions like working under a tight deadline, mentoring juniors, and a few concepts around agile and all.

I was not able to perform well in this round and hence, it led to rejection.

The overall interview experience was very awesome and it took 1 week to conduct the entire loop.