JPMC | SWE 2 Interview | Rejected

I was initially approached by a recruiter on LinkedIn for a Software Engineer 2 position at JPMorgan Chase. With 3 years and 2 months of experience in the Fintech domain and a TC of 20 LPA, I decided to proceed with the interview process.

Round 1

This round was taken by a VP and started with several questions from my resume, primarily focused on my experience. After that, I was asked to open Hackerrank and solve an OOPS-related question. This led to a detailed discussion with follow-up questions, mainly regarding HashMap internals and the proper overriding of equal() and hashCode() methods. The interviewer also asked a semi-LeetCode style question involving array manipulation, though I don't recall the exact problem. Towards the end, we discussed general questions about Kafka and REST APIs, both of which were mentioned on my resume.

Round 2

This round was also conducted by a VP. After brief introductions, I was asked to directly open the Hackerrank link. I was then given two LeetCode medium-level questions, both related to array manipulation. Unfortunately, I don't remember the exact problems.

Round 3

The third round was again with a VP, and it was quite intense. I was thoroughly grilled on Java internals, specifically focusing on multithreading concepts. This included questions about the volatile keyword, how it works internally, the differences between optimistic and pessimistic locking, and the internal mechanisms of the synchronized keyword. Following that, the discussion shifted to Kafka internals – how Brokers function, how they maintain topics, strategies to increase Kafka's throughput, and the concept of Dead-Letter Queues (DLQs). Finally, the interviewer delved into Webflux internals, which I had mentioned on my resume, leading to some questions about Virtual Threads.

I tried my absolute best in this round, but it was personally very challenging for me. I ultimately washed out from this round and did not receive an offer.