JioHotstar - Staff SDE Interview Experience (2026) | Ghosted after final HR Round

A recruiter reached out to me via LinkedIn for a Staff Software Development Engineer role at JioHotstar/JioStar, Bangalore. The interview process started a few days later.

Round 1: AI Assisted Coding (Low Level Design)

The recruiter informed me beforehand that I would need to set up an AI assistant and use an IDE of my choice. The interview was scheduled for 1.5 hours, so there was sufficient time to code, leverage the AI assistant for refinements, and produce a working solution.

Problem: Design and implement a workflow management service. A workflow can consist of a fixed number of tasks, with a predefined set of task types.

The problem statement was intentionally ambiguous. The expectation was to clarify the requirements, define the entities and models, and then use an AI agent to help refine and implement the solution.

I started by establishing the requirements and defining the models. I also leveraged the AI assistant to review and refine the design. Once the interviewer was satisfied with the models and API definitions, I used my IDE-integrated AI agent to generate the implementation incrementally, reviewing each piece of generated code and making corrections or refinements wherever necessary.

Interviewer was interested in my understanding of design patterns and concurrency as well.

Overall, I think this round went really well. I actually had around 20 minutes left after completing the implementation and follow-ups, so we used the remaining time to discuss how we could extend the design at an HLD level and had a general discussion about the company.

Round 2: High Level Design

Problem: Design the live viewer counter feature on Hotstar (a feature that was available on the platform earlier).

I was able to come up with a scalable design and address all the follow-up questions. The interviewer focused particularly on scalability and the trade-offs between read fanout and write fanout.

Overall, the emphasis was on driving the e2e design, identifying and deep-diving into critical paths, and accounting for trade-offs.

I felt that my experience building large-scale distributed systems helped me significantly more than generic system design prep for this round. I had already encountered and debated many similar problems while building and operating production systems.

Round 3: Bar Raiser Round

This round was conducted by a Software Architect at JioHotstar. The first half focused on my experience and past projects, including questions about how I handled conflicts and disagreements at work.

The second half involved a smaller design problem:

Design a clickstream aggregator that tracks the number of clicks on a particular advertisement on Hotstar.

Overall, this round also went quite well. The interviewer seemed genuinely impressed, and we finished with some time to spare.

Round 4: Managerial Round

This was a general discussion about my experience, past projects, and professional journey.

• projects and accomplishments I am particularly proud of
• what I was looking for in my next role
• my experience working on large scale systems, driving projects end to end, mentoring other engineers
• how I typically use AI in my day-to-day engineering work

A week after completing this round, the recruiter reached out to confirm that all technical rounds were complete and that they wanted to schedule a 30-minute HR discussion on the same day.

Round 5: HR Discussion

Pretty much standard. Past experiences, expectations in my new role etc.

After this round, I didn't hear back from the recruiter for about a week. I followed up to check whether we were moving ahead. The recruiter mentioned that they would get back to me with an update within a day, but unfortunately, that never happened.

I didn't bother to follow up again.

Overall Experience

The complete process took a bit over 5 weeks.

From a technical perspective, I had a good experience. However, it was disappointing to complete the loop clearing each round one by one, have the HR discussion, but receive no closure or communication after investing a lot of time. But that's how it goes sometimes.

Anyways, hope this helps others!