eBay | SDE-2 interview experience | Virtual

Experience: 2 YOE + 6 Months of internship with the same team.

Round 1: DSA(1 hour)

• Asked 2 DSA problems.
• Asked few questions before starting to think of code then explained brute force approch followed by optimized.

These are the questions asked:

• Given an array heights where each elemetnts represents the height of a vertical line..need to pick two lines to act as the walls of the container. Return the maximum area (amount of water) the container can hold.

• Given an integer array temps representing the daily temperatures i need write a function to calculate how many days you need to wait after each day to get a warmer temperature.The function should return an array answer and where answer[i] represents the number of days you have to wait for a warmer temperature after the ith day.If there is no warmer temperature in the future, set answer[i] = 0.

• for the second question interviewer asked me to walk through an example, Overall it was great round.

Round 2: System Design(1 hour)

• This was the question: Design an application called LunchDrop, primarily used by corporate employees to order food at their workplace.

The application will have a list of restaurants and their menus, with the available restaurants rotating on a daily basis.

As a user, you should be able to: Log in to the application and view the restaurants available for the day. Browse the menu of each restaurant. Select a food item and customize it based on available options, such as tacos, vegetables, toppings, sauces, etc. Place an order with the selected customizations.

I asked the interviewer clarifying questions before jumping into the design. The interviwer asked me questions in between i don't remember all...here are few I remembered

• while we order...say that we have technical issue and there is a change in menu or something orders items are not availbale.. how to handle it?
• What kind of db for menu database?
• How do we get the updates from the real time, can we include it in this system desing?
• Even the restaurants get updated...where all can caching be used in this system?

Asked me few other questions why ebay? why leaving current company?

Overall it went really well.

Round 3: HM round (1 hour)-Design round: He was the same interviewer who took my 1st round, so didn't took my introduction...i thought it will be like resume deepdive and cultural fit but it was a design round again.

• This was the question: Design a dashboard which shows top 10 items and top 10 categories in ebay by number of quantites sold.

I clarified the requirements, I explained my approach, he questioned my each and every decision..he asked me to explain. I remembered few questions out of all of those

• Explain the item quantity aggregator and category aggregator in detail.
• How does the system determine the current quantity for each aggregator?
• Given eBay's traffic volume, how frequently would we write updates to the state store?
• How frequently should we write to the state store? What are the pros and cons of writing more or less frequently?
• How would we retrieve the final aggregation from RocksDB?
• If each partition has its own RocksDB instance, how would the item aggregator maintain and process the aggregated data across all partitions?
• When do we trigger the process that combines the data from all the partition-level databases?
• Suppose there are 1 million events, each causing an update. Would that result in 1 million events being published to the intermediate Kafka topic? If not, how would you optimize this?

Asked me situational question.... Any conflict with my team member and how i solved it? Why ebay? Any situation conflict with my manager and how it is resolved by me?

Overall..I felt the interview went well. Fingers crossed.

EDIT: got a positive response, accepted the offer.

Compensation Details: https://leetcode.com/discuss/post/8473980/ebay-sde2-bengaluru-by-anonymous_user-c5yc/