Dream11 | SDE-2 Backend | Mumbai | Reject

Initial Recruiter Call

After applying multiple times through various channels without success, I finally received a call from a recruiter within a week of my latest application. The recruiter provided valuable insights into the company, the team, and the desired skillset. We discussed my motivations for a change, my interest in the role, and my expectations. She outlined the interview process, which would consist of two online rounds followed by three onsite rounds. As I had been actively preparing and had recently completed a few other interviews, I was ready to proceed, and my first round was scheduled for the following week.

Interview Process

First Round: DSA Round

This round was a typical DSA interview where the interviewer immediately presented problems. I was given two LeetCode-style questions to code directly on the platform:

• Binary Search Variant: This question was similar to the Painter's Partition problem. I discussed my approach with the interviewer, who was satisfied, and then proceeded to code. I missed a couple of edge cases initially, but the interviewer guided me to correct them.
• Topological Sort Variant: This was a graph traversal problem that required topological sorting. I was able to solve it optimally on my first attempt.

By the end of this round, I felt confident about my performance, and the interviewer seemed satisfied. A few days later, the recruiter confirmed that I had cleared this round and would be moving forward.

Second Round: DB Design/Resume Round

I was initially told this round would focus on database design, possibly involving my past projects or a new problem statement. Despite getting stuck in Bengaluru traffic on my way to the office, I managed to start the interview on time. The round began with a deep dive into a service my team owned at Amazon. The discussion covered its architecture, latency, failure handling, scalability, multi-tenancy, monitoring, and various optimizations. Towards the end, the interviewer asked how I would build this service from scratch. Since I had already contemplated this scenario, I was able to articulate my ideas clearly.

The discussion was very engaging, and I felt confident about my performance. A day later, the recruiter confirmed I had cleared this round and scheduled my onsite interviews.

Onsite Interviews

Dream11 conducts its onsite rounds in Mumbai. My interviews were scheduled a few weeks later, coinciding with the Diwali vacation, which gave me ample time to prepare for system design concepts. Dream11 provided all necessary transportation, including flights and cabs. On the interview day, I arrived in Mumbai in the early afternoon. The recruiter greeted me and offered lunch at their office, after which my three back-to-back onsite rounds began.

Third Round: System Design Round

This round was conducted by two SDE-3s and lasted over 90 minutes. The focus was on designing a real-time monitoring system, much like AWS CloudWatch or Prometheus combined with Grafana.

I began by gathering functional and non-functional requirements before moving on to the data model and overall system architecture. The interviewers introduced additional requirements as we progressed. I proposed a solution utilizing a Time Series Database, Kafka, and Apache Spark for real-time monitoring, although I later felt Flink might have been a better choice. We discussed scalability, failure handling, ingestion mechanisms, and various database choices. A significant portion of the discussion revolved around managing time windows for aggregation and metric ingestion. Towards the end, I was challenged to explain how I would implement a database from scratch using only EC2 instances. I detailed the architecture of MongoDB and Cassandra, covering aspects like append-on-file strategies, SSTables, bloom filters, merging, indexing, and replication strategies. However, I struggled to articulate search optimization techniques as I wasn't familiar with ElasticSearch and inverted indexing.

Despite struggling with a few questions, the in-person system design round was great for focused problem-solving. Later, the recruiter provided positive feedback, and I moved to the next round, which was a relief.

Fourth Round: Hiring Manager Round

This round was conducted by an AVP at Dream11. We started with a deep dive into the projects I had worked on. He asked me questions about system scalability, monitoring strategies, and on-call responsibilities. He also inquired about my day-to-day work, my role, and my responsibilities. Following this, he posed multiple behavioral questions, such as instances where I helped a teammate, how I handle multiple priorities, and my experiences with failures and subsequent learnings. Towards the end, we discussed Dream11's tech stack, ongoing projects, and their work culture.

It was a productive discussion, and I was informed that I would proceed to the final HR round.

Fifth Round: HR Values Round

By this point, I was quite exhausted from the travel and consecutive interviews. This HR round focused on culture fit and situational questions. I was asked about how I handle failures, manager feedback, and my motivations for joining Dream11. They also asked if I had played Dream11, to which I jokingly replied that I had played a Kabaddi match yesterday and lost a small amount of money. In hindsight, I realized I didn't structure my responses effectively using the STAR framework, and my answers lacked clear learning points, which may have impacted the outcome.

Post-Interview Experience

After about a week, I reached out to the recruiter for feedback, but she said she would get back to me. Despite multiple follow-ups, I received no response or rejection. Almost a month later, and after I had already secured another offer, the recruiter finally contacted me. She stated that my values didn't align with the company and mentioned some feedback from the system design round. She also mentioned conducting another debrief, but never reached out again.

Final Thoughts

Despite the outcome, it was a valuable learning experience.