Cohesity interview experience - Software Engineer 3
Summary
I completed four interview rounds (coding, design, design, and hiring manager) for a Software Engineer 3 position at Cohesity in Bangalore. Although I received positive feedback on most rounds, the process was stopped and I did not get an offer.
Full Experience
YoE: 4Y 3M
Last working day: Sep 2025
Org: A startup in biomedical research
Tech Stack: Python, bash, Cloud(GCP, Azure) based distributed system with event driven architecture
Interviewed for Software Engineer 3 (core team) at Cohesity, Bangalore in May 2026.
Round 1 - Coding
Scheduled with SE-3 from Bangalore
Most Stones Removed with Same Row or Column
Discussed DFS based and disjoint-set based component count and TC.
The feedback was positive for this round.
Round 2 - Design
Scheduled with SE 3 from Bangalore
LLD - (Can't recall exact constraints/requirements, still added)
An implementation where ordered sequence of values arrive and 10 most recent values are to be displayed when a read is performed. Support low latency writes.
Discussed how it would work in a distributed system. I suggested a queue based approach for writes where we could use idempotency and ACID DB to avoid duplicates if queue/ack fails.
The feedback was positive for this round.
Round 3 - Design
Scheduled with a Senior Staff from a US team
Was supposed to be a mix of LLD + HLD. But discussed around my current project of event-driven architecture with high level diagram. The discussion progressively moved towards the backup and recovery work of Cohesity.
We discussed about -
- uploading large files using synchronous, async and chunked approaches
- data corruption while upload
- storing chunked data and reusability across tenants (if any)
- replication and erasure coding to handle data loss
- identifying data corruption and recovering it
- downloading and more
Was a really great discussion with a hands‑on professional.
The feedback was positive for this round.
Round 4 - Hiring Manager
Scheduled with DoE from US.
General behavioural questions around how my manager, team, family and friends perceive me.
One technical question about appending one file's content to another. Both files are 100 GB in size. I described reading a chunk of data (depending on RAM) and appending it, mentioning possible issues like memory corruption and insufficient disk space.
As per the recruiter, the technical signal was mixed from this round, so they scheduled another coding round.
Additional Round - Coding
Scheduled with a Senior Staff from a US team
Did not ask a LeetCode style question. Instead I reviewed a simplified C++ codebase around a streaming architecture, discussing SOLID principles, retry logic, and API documentation.
The feedback was positive for this round.
The recruiter indicated that finance side delays were causing the process to slow, and eventually I was told to move on to other opportunities.
Interview Questions (1)
Most Stones Removed with Same Row or Column
Given a list of stones on a 2D plane, a stone can be removed if it shares a row or column with another stone. Return the maximum number of stones that can be removed such that at least one stone remains in each connected component.