IndMoney technical architect | PASSED | DECLINED

Current: Salesforce LMTS. Tier-1 college. 11+ yrs of exp.

Here is the process. (no coding rounds)

1. HR - 1.25 hr.
2. SD 1 - 1.5 hr
3. SD 2 - 1.5 hr
4. SD 3 - 1.5 hr
5. SD 4 - 1.5 hr
6. PM director call - 1 hr
7. finance round - 1.25 hr
8. CEO round - 2.5 hours (2 SD)

Total: ~12 hours

There were 2 SD questions in each SD round, total - 10 SDs. Every round was elimination for next to be scheduled. The focus was majorly on scaling services with exact partition keys, etc and capacity estimations. I quickly covered functional requirements. The judgement was on tech tradeoffs taken and scoping of problem, completeness of design and communication effeciency

The tech team leadership is really great and so is their CA.

1. HR - tell me how will you brin impact to IND money, latest industry development in trading & Gen AI. Infra automation, ost optimization, value creation concepts. How I wil drive the change. Test of engineering strength estimation required to support their scale for Infra. Where to save costs, etc.
2. with CTO - design a top K hotel predection with 5k hotels depedning on clicks on detail page and their scale for 30 min window(configurable). Solved using redis and 2 leading-lagging kafka consumer groups.
   
   Follow up design question on this.
3. with VP of stocks - 2 sub designs
   a. design IndMoney real time ticker.
   b. Portfolio management - real time & passive user for stocks, passive for MF, etc
   c. Manage orders
   
4. with VP of Stocks - multiple SDs - 1.5 hr
   a. Real time stock trading latency in <500 micro-sec (under a millisecond)
   b. Real time Stock trading & order settlement
   c. Real time leaderboard of stocks as in IndMoney app.
   
   In this round there was a choice b/w Design UPI and real time stock trading of full indMoney app. I chose trading to have an deep & challanging conversation with his expertise.
5. With CTO - 2 SDs
   a. Variant of top K topics on twitter, but with NLP filters, word filters, always high scale topics should not be trndeing and prediction of topics as trending
   b. Design a duplicate JSOn checking for large size JSONs
   
6. With Director PM - Leadership, conflict resolution, hiring, management, etc
   a. How do you manage low/high performers.
   b. What attributes you look when hiring engineers.
   c. How do you break requirements.
   d. How do I plan.
   e. Examples of conflict resolution inside team, cross engineering team, cross function PM, cross levels leaders/directors/VPs.
   f. Strategy of execution.
   g. Drawing boundries.
   h. And some of stress testing too and created a high conflicting and irritating environment to test.
7. With CA
   Learnt about their unit economics. Differen leaders and areas. Understand where cost and revenue lie sin product. Understtod unit economics and user aquisition cost and cost return period - 18 months. Then asked about ideas to creat more profit, i shared NRIs stock trading - high value , less qty more profit. How do i make decisions, prioritizations. Examples from prev work ex how do i include cost in decision making, etc. I also had some queries on value system and appraisal sysyetm driven by this person.
8. with CEO - 2 SDs (not deep)
   a. Portflio management - duplicate question.
   b. Tax calculation & reposting system like zerodha for India & US stocks, MD, etc for ind Money.
   c. time to execute, estimation of engineering strength, evalyated in decision made for traedeoffs for Product, value, cost, time to market.
   d. Then had a long discussion for upcoming work and ideas like Gift city to implement.
   e. Handling stakeholders cross functional, etc.
   

Overall it was a good deep dicsussion with Technical leaders & CA, but i declined due to offer from Meta London.